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Gingerbread, Nuremburg
Beat the whites and yolks of eight eggs together with one pound of finely-sifted sugar for half an hour. Mix with this the peel of a lemon cut very thin and minced fine, and a table-spoonful of ground spices in the proportion of two parts of cinnamon and one part each of cloves and cardamoms, also a table-spoonful of finely-cut candied orange-peel, half a pound of blanched and roasted almonds sliced small, and one pound of fine dry flour. Mix all thoroughly together, and form into cakes about eight inches long by four inches wide and two inches thick; spread them on wafer paper, and bake in a quick oven. Probable cost, 2s.
A Nuremberg-style Lebkuchen batter: no butter, no leavening, all of its lift from long-beaten whole eggs. That beating is the whole recipe.
- The hinge: beat the eggs and sugar to a ribbonHalf an hour by hand equals roughly 10-15 minutes in a stand mixer on high, until the mixture is pale, thick and falls from the whisk in a wide ribbon that holds its shape for a second or two. There is no baking powder here; if the foam is under-beaten or knocked down when the flour and almonds go in, the cakes bake dense and hard.
- Weights, not cupsOne pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups, one pound of flour about 3 1/2 cups, and half a pound of almonds about 1 1/2 cups whole (rather more once sliced). Because the ratio of egg to sugar to flour is the only structure in this batter, weigh rather than measure by volume.
- Oven temperatureA "quick oven" is generally reckoned at somewhere around 400-450F, which suits thin Lebkuchen but risks scorching slabs two inches thick before the centre sets. Bake nearer 325-350F for these dimensions and expect 30-40 minutes or more; the tops should be dry and springy, the centres still slightly soft.
- Wafer paperThe Oblaten the recipe calls for are edible starch wafers, still sold for Lebkuchen and for cake decorating. They are baked onto the base and eaten with the cake; parchment is a substitute for the baking but not for the traditional result.
- SpicesA tablespoon of mixed ground spice in the proportions given works out to roughly 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon and 3/4 teaspoon each of cloves and cardamom. Buy cardamom pods and grind the seeds if possible; pre-ground cardamom fades fast.
- Almonds"Blanched and roasted" means skinned, then toasted until fragrant and just colouring, and sliced small rather than reduced to meal. The pieces should stay visible in the cut cake.
- Candied peelBoth the fresh lemon zest and the candied orange peel are wanted; they do different jobs. Use good soft candied peel in whole pieces and cut it yourself, as the pre-diced supermarket mix is dry and tastes largely of syrup.
- Yield and keepingThe quantities make perhaps two or three cakes of the size described, or a couple of dozen smaller ones. Like all Lebkuchen they improve after three or four days in a tin, and were often stored with a piece of apple or a slice of bread to keep them yielding.
Nuremberg has been the German centre of Lebkuchen since the late Middle Ages, when the city sat on the spice routes running north from Venice; its bakers were later organised as a recognised trade of Lebküchner, a development of the 17th century. The richest local version, now protected as Elisenlebkuchen, uses very little flour and a great deal of nut and egg; Cassell's recipe is a diluted, Anglicised cousin of it, keeping the wafer base, the almonds and the cinnamon-clove-cardamom perfume but reverting to a full pound of flour. That it appears in an English dictionary of cookery at all is a sign of how thoroughly Victorian households had absorbed German Christmas baking, a taste generally credited to the influence of Prince Albert's court. The "probable cost, 2s." is the book's habitual costing note, and two shillings was a real sum for a batch of cakes at the time.