The traveller’s cake that came to France via the Caribbean

This soft pound cake infused with rum is a local delicacy that only improves with time.

Gâteau nantais with white rum icing. Credit: Jérôme Rommé / Adobe Stock

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Flick the pages of the Larousse Gastronomique, the French food bible, and you’ll find hundreds of entries for cakes, some world-famous, but many that are more obscure. One of the latter is gâteau nantais, a regional cake with Caribbean influences.

French chef and author Gabriel Gaté explains that gâteau nantais is like a quatre-quarts, or pound cake, made with equal amounts of butter, flour, egg, and sugar. But it sees part of the flour replaced with almond meal, and rum added to the batter. It’s also sometimes flavoured with orange or lemon zest, as well as vanilla. Once cooked, the cake can be doused in a rum syrup. Then, more rum is mixed with sugar to make a white icing.

The result is a dense and moist pound cake, fragrant, with depth brought by the rum.

When the cake is served to kids, rum can be replaced with orange juice, lemon juice or orange blossom water.

Credit: Blink TV

If using rum, choose a gold or dark one, or even better, rhum agricole. But Nantes-born chef and TV host Manu Feildel reveals that what really makes the cake is the quality of the butter, salted, of course: “Brittany is known for its butter and good dairy. They use salted and demi-sel butter, and we do in Nantes as well. When you put salt and sugar together, it creates the perfect balance.”

A cake for travellers…

Nantes, which is now part of the Loire region, used to be the capital of Brittany. It’s one of the oldest and most important ports of France, which has a dark history as a slave port. In the 18th century, triangular trade brought ingredients like cane sugar, vanilla and rum from the Caribbean to Nantes.

It’s believed a local baker used these ingredients to create the cake in 1820, hence how it was dubbed the “traveller’s cake”. The nickname can also be attributed to the long shelf life of the cake, and how sailors used to dip their biscuits in rum during long journeys at sea.

First served as a high-end dessert at home, gâteau nantais was forgotten, then popularised again by baked goods manufacturer LU in the 20th century.

And for families

While you can find gâteau nantais in cafes and bakeries around Nantes, locals tend to make and eat it at home.

“It’s really a family cake; it’s easy to make. You only have to mix the ingredients, put them in your cake pan, cook the cake and make the icing. No need to make a meringue or a cream; it’s so simple!” says Gaté, who grew up in the Loire Valley. “In our region, if somebody was coming over during the day, you’d serve that cake, sometimes with a glass of sweet white wine or a glass of Champagne.”

Gâteau nantais is also synonym with afternoon treat for Fleidel: “It’s the type of cake you’d have at home when you come back from school. You’d sit down at four o’clock with a hot chocolate and a little cake,” he says, remembering the version with apricot jam in the middle.

And no matter how you aromatise your gâteau nantais, consider baking it a day before serving it to ensure all the flavours fully infuse the cake.