Beat 1½ pounds of sugar and ½ pound of butter to a cream; add 4 yolks of eggs, a pinch of salt and nutmeg. Stir in ½ pound of flour, 4 ounces of currants, 2 ounces of chopped almonds, 1 tablespoonful of citron and candied orange peel chopped fine. Add the whites beaten stiff and bake in small well-buttered cake-tins until done; then cover with a thin icing.
A rich creamed cake batter baked in small tins, of the sort a 1900s cook would have called a sugar cake or tea cake. The proportions as printed need a second look before you start.
- The sugar is almost certainly a misprintThe sugar looks like a misprint -- 1½ pounds of sugar against ½ pound each of butter and flour gives a batter roughly three parts sugar to one part flour, which is unlikely to behave like cake batter. Many rich cake recipes of the period use equal weights of sugar, butter and flour, so ½ pound of sugar may be what was intended, though this is a guess rather than a documented correction. Treat the printed figure as unreliable.
- Weights, not cups½ pound butter is 2 sticks, ½ pound flour is about 1¾ cups, ½ pound sugar about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons. This is a recipe written for a scale, and it is worth using one.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Small rich cakes of this type want a moderate oven, 350F, for 18–25 minutes depending on tin size; the high sugar and butter content means they colour before they set, so judge by a skewer rather than by the tops.
- "Small well-buttered cake-tins"Individual moulds; the recipe gives no size. A buttered and floured 12-cup muffin tin is a reasonable modern stand-in. Paper liners will work but you lose the buttered edge.
- Citron and candied peelCitron here is candied citron, the thick-rinded fruit sold in blocks or diced tubs, not lemon. If you cannot find it, candied orange and lemon peel carry the recipe on their own. Note that the printed "1 tablespoonful" may mean a tablespoon of the citron and peel together rather than of each.
- AlmondsBlanched sweet almonds, chopped rather than ground. Do not substitute almond flour, which will change the crumb.
- Folding the whitesFour whites beaten stiff are the only lift in the recipe — there is no chemical raising agent. Fold them in in two additions and get the cakes into the oven promptly, or they will deflate and bake dense.
- The "thin icing"A glacé icing: about 1 cup confectioners' sugar loosened with a tablespoon or so of water or lemon juice, thin enough to pour and settle flat. Apply once the cakes are fully cool.
- YieldAbout 12 to 16 small cakes, and they keep several days in a tin — the dried fruit and butter make them better on the second day.
Books like this one, arranged as a dish a day with a nationality attached to each, were a publishing formula in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the labels were applied loosely. There is nothing distinctively Italian about this batter beyond the candied citron and orange peel and the almonds, ingredients American and English cooks loosely associated with Italian baking. What the recipe actually represents is a standard rich pound-cake batter, eggs separated for lift, dressed with the store-cupboard candied fruit that signalled a foreign origin to its readers. The absence of baking powder may place it in the older tradition of relying entirely on long creaming and stiffly beaten whites, though baking powder was already widely available in this period.