Walk along the streets of Santiago. Every other door is a dulceria with cakes by the dozens. But always the sustancia de Chilan, always the alfajores, this the national sweet, found in every city throughout Chile's long ribbon of land.
Here are cakes without names, tinted pink, tinted yellow, melt-in-your-mouth cakes, jam and meringue cakes, but never too many cakes to keep the Chileans happy. These vivacious, joy-loving people buy cakes in early morning to cat after mass. They eat the little sweets with their luncheon, with afternoon tea. At the bar of Santiago's Crillon Hotel, the Chilean sweets, executed with a French flair, disappear by the tray loads, along with the daiquiris, the martinis, and the good wines of the land.
You must visit Chile to eat lobsters from San Fernandez, to munch that glorified hors d'oeuvre called the framres, but the little cakes are sold in New York at B. Altman's sweet case. Five kinds of the dulces Chilenos in the collection, fresh daily, each specimen patterned exactly to a sweet of the homeland. These confections are the handiwork of Martha Cabrera, a Santiagoan woman who came here in 1930 and in the grim depression years thought of the alfajores.
Martha determind to make the alfajores. She turned her Palisades Park, New Jersey, kitchen into a bakery and began selling her cakes among friends. The grocery buyer of B. Altman's (Fifth Avenue at 34th) met these fragile affairs at a Chilean cocktail party. Something New Yorkers would love, and she knew it at the first bite. Not with the cocktails, of course—too sweet for that purpose to suit the North American's taste—but with ice cream, with fruit, with tea. Roll out the adjectives!
One glance and you know which cakes are the Chilean—no others are like them. Tedious toil goes into their making. The alfajores, for example, require a sweet dough made of egg yolks, butter, flour, and a few tears of the lemon, this rolled thin as a blade, then cut into rings about two inches across. The rings are sandwiched with a caramel-like filling made of sugar and milk, cooked over very low heat, and stirred constantly untill thickened. Now the sweet sandwich is baked slowly, then cooled. Meanwhile sugar and egg whites have been beaten to make a meringue to cover the cakes. So tender, this, that one swift bite sends the whole sweet structure crumbling in the mouth.
A new arrival is the triangle which has a base of the same dough as the alfajores, this covered with apricot marmalade, then baked, after which the whole is mantled in a meringue tinted buttercup yellow.
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