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Albany Cakes
Lightly beat six eggs, and stir them into a quart of milk; add a tea-spoonful each of bicarbonate of soda and salt, dissolved in a little hot water. Stir in sufficient fine flour to make a thick batter. Butter small tins the size of a tea-saucer, and half fill them with the mixture. Bake them in a quick oven. This makes very nice cakes, which are much used for breakfast in America. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 2d.
A plain American breakfast batter cake, baked in shallow tins rather than griddled. Two things in the original need translating before it will work: the oven heat and the leavening.
- Quick oven"Quick" in Victorian usage is generally read as roughly 400-425F. Twenty minutes at that heat should set and brown a half-filled shallow tin; too cool an oven risks the batter drying out before it rises.
- Soda with nothing to react withA teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda in sweet milk has no acid to work against, so it gives very little lift and can leave a faint soapy taste. Sour milk or buttermilk would supply the acid the soda needs; the recipe as printed calls for plain milk.
- The quartAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 5 US cups. Cassell's is a British book, so scale accordingly if you are working from US measures.
- "Sufficient fine flour"Genuinely unquantified, and the original gives no figure at all. Consistency is the only guide: enough flour that the batter drops heavily from the spoon rather than pours.
- Tins the size of a tea-saucerThat is roughly 4 to 5 inches across and shallow. Individual tart tins, a wide muffin tin, or crumpet rings on a baking sheet all stand in. Half-filling is deliberate; these are meant to be flat cakes, not domed muffins.
- Butter the tins generouslyThere is no sugar and almost no fat in the batter, so it grips metal. Butter well or line the bases.
- Yield and servingExpect a dozen or more saucer-sized cakes. They are unsweetened, and the original places them at breakfast; they are best eaten hot from the oven.
Cassell's includes this among a number of American breakfast breads that interested late-Victorian British readers, for whom a hot, soda-risen batter cake at breakfast was unfamiliar. The name points to Albany, the state capital of New York; the attachment of a city name to a recipe of this kind was often a way of marking a regional habit rather than a documented invention. The reliance on bicarbonate of soda is consistent with a mid-to-later nineteenth-century date: chemical leavening spread through domestic kitchens over the middle decades of the century, and it is what allowed a batter to go from bowl to oven without yeast and without waiting.