A dense almond cake soaked and iced with rum, sweet enough to keep for weeks. It is the edible trace of Nantes as a colonial sugar and rum port, and every boulangerie in the centre sells its own version.
The gâteau nantais is a 19th-century city cake built out of exactly what the port had too much of: cane sugar refined on the quays and rum shipped in from the Antilles. It was made heavy on both deliberately, because a cake carrying that much sugar and spirit keeps and travels. The result is a low, close-textured almond cake with a thin white rum icing set hard on top, sold in the same window as the berlingots. Nantes cannot tell that part of its food history without also naming the trade that funded it: the city was France's leading slave-trading port in the 18th century, and the sugar and rum economy of the quays is the direct reason this cake tastes the way it does.
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