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Cake, Diet Bread
Beat four eggs, then add to them a quarter of a pound of dried flour, and half a pound of loaf sugar, with six drops of almond flavouring. When these are well mixed together, place them near the fire to warm, then pour into a well-buttered mould, and bake in a moderate oven. Time, to bake, half an hour. Sufficient for a small mould. Probable cost, 7d.
A whisked sponge with no leavening and no fat in the batter — the eggs do all the lifting, so the beating is the whole recipe. Everything else is timing.
- The hinge: beat the eggs and sugar to the ribbon stageWith no baking powder and no butter, the only aeration comes from air whipped into the eggs. Beat whole eggs with the sugar until pale, thick and holding a trailing ribbon from the whisk — five to eight minutes in a stand mixer — then fold the flour in by hand so you do not knock the air out.
- "Dried flour"Flour was spread in a tin and warmed by the fire to drive off moisture, since sacked flour in a damp larder was heavy and lumpy. Modern flour needs none of this; sift 4 oz (about 1 cup) plain flour and use it as it is.
- Loaf sugarSugar came as a hard cone to be broken up and pounded. Use 8 oz (about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons) caster sugar — fine grain dissolves into the eggs, which coarse granulated will not do reliably in a cold-whisked sponge.
- Almond flavouringMost likely a bottled almond essence rather than a liqueur, though a homemade bitter-almond water cannot be ruled out for a book of this date. Modern extract is potent; six drops in this quantity of batter is a light background note.
- "Place them near the fire to warm"Warming the mixture to blood heat loosens it so it folds and pours smoothly and rises faster in the oven. A bowl set over (not in) warm water for a minute or two does the same thing. Do not let it get hot enough to begin setting the eggs.
- A moderate ovenAround 350F / 175C. Half an hour suits a small mould; a wider, shallower tin will be done sooner. Test with a skewer in the centre.
- The mouldButter generously and then dust with a mix of flour and sugar. A fatless sponge grips a tin hard, and this batter has no butter of its own to help it release. Turn out within a few minutes of leaving the oven.
- Yield"Sufficient for a small mould." It is best eaten the day it is baked; without fat it stales quickly.
"Diet bread" has nothing to do with slimming — diet here carries its older sense of a prescribed regimen, food thought suitable for invalids, convalescents and children. Recipes under this name run through English and Scottish cookery books from the eighteenth century onward, and they are almost always this same thing: a plain fatless sponge of eggs, sugar and flour, sometimes flavoured with caraway, lemon peel or almond, close kin to the Naples biscuit and the sponge finger. Butterless cakes were considered light on the stomach, which is why they turn up in sickroom cookery alongside gruels and beef tea, and the same batter baked in fingers or drops became the biscuit served with wine or a custard. Cassell's gives the probable cost as 7d., a reminder that the four eggs were the expensive part of a cake that contained almost nothing else.