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Gateau with Apricots
Cut the top off a stale Madeira cake, and remove a large piece out of the centre, leaving a wall of cake two inches thick all round. Take the contents of a tin of preserved apricots, and stew them with a tea-cupful of sugar for fifteen minutes. Fill up the centre of the dish with the apricots, and put on the top. Boil up the syrup, and pour enough of it over the cake to soak it. When cold, cover with a thick custard or whipped cream. Probable cost, 2s. 6d.
A hollowed-out cake case filled with fruit and soaked in syrup — a Victorian way of rescuing a stale Madeira. Nothing here is difficult; the variables are the size of the cake and how much syrup it will take before it collapses.
- The hinge: soak, don't drownAdd the hot syrup a few spoonfuls at a time, letting each addition sink in before the next. A stale cake absorbs steadily but there is a point at which the two-inch wall gives way, and once it does the gateau cannot be rescued.
- Stale is deliberateA day-or-two-old Madeira cuts cleanly and takes syrup without turning to paste. A fresh cake will tear when you scoop out the centre and go sodden immediately.
- Cutting the caseSlice off the top in one horizontal piece to use as a lid, then cut down with a small knife and lift out the crumb, keeping the two-inch wall the recipe calls for and leaving the base intact. Save the removed crumb for a trifle.
- A tin of apricotsTin sizes varied; two 400 g tins of apricot halves in syrup gives roughly the right volume for a 7-inch cake. Reserve every drop of the liquid — that is the syrup you will boil up.
- The sugarA teacupful is roughly 4 to 6 oz (about 110–170 g). With modern tins already packed in syrup, start with less and taste; the fifteen minutes' stewing mainly softens the fruit and thickens the liquid.
- Reducing the syrupThe recipe says only to boil up the syrup. A short boil thickens it a little so it clings and flavours as it goes rather than running straight through the cake and pooling on the dish; do not take it so far that it will no longer soak in.
- Custard or cream"A thick custard" here means a proper egg custard cooked until it coats the back of a spoon, then cooled before it goes on — the recipe's 'when cold'. Whipped cream is the easier option and holds its shape better on a soaked cake.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. Assemble and soak several hours ahead so the syrup distributes evenly, then top with cream or custard shortly before it goes to the table.
Madeira cake is generally said to take its name not from an ingredient but from the wine it was served with in the early nineteenth century — a plain, close-grained butter cake, flavoured with lemon rather than the fortified wine itself. Recipes like this one belong to the long British tradition of the built pudding, in which a stale cake is hollowed, filled, moistened and dressed with cream: the same logic that produced trifle, charlotte and tipsy cake. The tin of preserved apricots places it late: commercial fruit canning had become comparatively cheap and reliable by the closing decades of the century, and readers could reach for out-of-season apricots far more readily than a generation earlier could. The costing in shillings and pence is given for almost every entry in the book.