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Almond Sponge-Cake
Take half a pound of loaf sugar, rub the rind of a lemon on two or three of the lumps, and crush the whole to powder. Then take five eggs, separate the whites from the yolks, and beat the latter for some minutes; then shake in the sugar gradually, and beat together. Stir in six ounces of flour, with about twenty drops of essence of almonds. Beat the whites to a solid froth, and add them to the rest. Fill a well-oiled tin about half full, and bake in a quick oven. Time to bake, about an hour. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for a moderate-sized mould.
A whisked sponge with no chemical leavening at all — the eggs do every bit of the lifting, and the lemon-rubbed sugar is the period's way of getting citrus oil into a batter. Two things in the original need rethinking: the strength of the almond flavouring and the oven.
- Loaf sugar and the lemonLoaf sugar came as a hard cone that was nipped into lumps; rubbing the rind against a lump abrades the zest and its oil straight into the sugar. Use sugar cubes for the rubbing if you have them, then grind everything to a powder in a processor, or simply zest the lemon into caster sugar. Half a pound is about 225 g, a generous cup.
- Flour and eggsSix ounces of flour is roughly 170 g, about 1 1/3 cups of plain flour, spooned and levelled. Nineteenth-century eggs were probably a shade smaller on average than modern large ones, so five medium eggs may be the closer match.
- Essence of almondsTwenty drops is only about 1 ml, and modern extract is standardised in a way Victorian essences were not, so treat the original quantity as approximate. Half a teaspoon of almond extract is plenty for this quantity of batter; much more will taste medicinal.
- The oven, which the original gets wrong for the timeThe oven -- A "quick oven" is usually glossed as a hot one, somewhere in the region of 400-450F, though the book gives no figures; an hour at that heat would be too much for a sponge of this size. Bake at 325-350F (165-175C) and expect 45-55 minutes for a deep mould, less for a shallow tin. It is done when the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- The hinge: foldingWith no baking powder, the volume comes only from the beaten whites. Beat the yolks and sugar until pale and thick enough to leave a trail, whip the whites to firm but not dry peaks, then fold flour and whites in alternately and stop the moment the streaks disappear. Get the batter into the tin and the oven immediately.
- Preparing the tin"Well-oiled" would have meant brushed with a bland oil or clarified butter, and some period recipes also dust the mould with flour or sugar. Butter and line the base with parchment; a plain tube or ring mould gives the even heat this batter wants.
- YieldAbout a 7-8 inch cake, eight to ten slices. "Sufficient for a moderate-sized mould" points to roughly a 1.5-litre capacity — fill it half full as instructed, since the sponge nearly doubles.
Whisked sponge cakes of this kind — sugar, eggs, flour, nothing else to raise them — were the backbone of English cake-making before chemical leaveners became reliable and cheap in the second half of the nineteenth century. The lemon-on-the-sugar-lump trick is a survival from the era of the sugar loaf, when cooks bought refined sugar as a solid cone and broke it up as needed; rubbing zest against the hard surface was a neat way to capture citrus oil in a kitchen without a fine grater. Almond flavouring in this period came from bitter almond or peach-kernel preparations, which is likely why the recipe measures it in drops rather than spoonfuls — it was potent stuff. The costing at one shilling is a reminder that Cassell's was written for households keeping an eye on the weekly books.