Take 1 cup of rye bread-crumbs and mix with the beaten yolks of 4 eggs, ½ cup of sugar, some pounded almonds, a pinch of cinnamon, nutmeg and a piece of chocolate grated. Add 1 teaspoonful of lemon-juice, 1 tablespoonful of brandy and 1 of wine. Beat the whites to a stiff froth; add to the mixture. Put in a well-buttered pudding-dish and bake until brown. Serve with wine sauce.
A rye-crumb torte of the Central European type, closer to a baked pudding than a cake. The original assumes a cook who can judge quantities by eye, so several amounts need pinning down.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe beaten whites are the only leavening here — there is no flour, no baking powder. Fold them in in two additions with a light hand, or the torte bakes dense and damp.
- Rye bread-crumbsDry, stale crumbs from a dark rye or pumpernickel rather than soft fresh crumbs; packaged breadcrumbs are generally wheat and sometimes seasoned. Dry slices in a low oven, then grind; a cup of dry crumbs will weigh somewhere around 3 oz depending on how finely they are ground.
- "Some pounded almonds"Read as about ½ cup (2 oz) blanched almonds ground fine. The amount is left to the cook, so err toward the fuller measure rather than a scattering.
- "A piece of chocolate"Around 1 oz, grated on the fine side of a box grater so it disperses. Unsweetened or dark chocolate suits the recipe better than milk chocolate, which did not exist in this form when the book was written.
- Oven and timeThe recipe says only "bake until brown." A moderate oven, around 350F, suits it; in a buttered dish of roughly 8 inches expect somewhere in the region of 35 to 45 minutes, until risen and browned and a skewer comes out with a few moist crumbs. Some sinking on cooling is to be expected.
- The wineIn a sweet dish of this kind "wine" most often meant a fortified wine such as sherry or Madeira rather than table wine. A tablespoon of either, with the brandy, is enough to scent it.
- Wine sauceThe expected accompaniment is a warm sweet sauce — butter, sugar, and sherry or Madeira beaten together over low heat, sometimes thickened with an egg yolk. The recipe says only "serve with wine sauce" and leaves the manner of serving open.
- YieldPerhaps six modest servings, depending on the dish used; the recipe specifies neither. Best warm and freshly made.
German and Austrian kitchens have a long habit of building tortes on breadcrumbs and ground nuts instead of flour — Brottorte and Schwarzbrottorte are still made in Bavaria and Austria today, generally with dark rye, almonds or hazelnuts, spice, and a spoonful of spirits. The technique made good use of stale dark bread in households where rye was the everyday loaf and wheat flour was the more expensive option, and the crumbs give a torte a coarse, faintly sour depth that flour cannot. This version appears in a book that assigned one dish to each day of the year and labelled each by nationality; the recipes are compressed to a paragraph and assume a cook who already knows what a pudding-dish and a wine sauce are.