Home › The Principles of Cookery › Josephine Cake
Josephine Cake
Beat four ounces of fresh butter to a cream, mix with it three ounces of pounded and sifted sugar, which, before being powdered, has been well rubbed upon the rind of half a fresh lemon. Add three well-beaten eggs, half a pound of biscuit flour, a quarter of a pound of picked currants, and two table-spoonfuls of sherry or Madeira. Beat all well together for some minutes, put the mixture into a well-buttered mould, and bake in a good oven. Time, forty minutes to bake. Probable cost, exclusive of the wine, 10d. Sufficient for three or four persons, or a small mould.
A small, rich, close-textured butter cake in the pound-cake family, leavened by nothing but beaten egg and thorough creaming. Two details carry it: the lemon-rubbed sugar and the length of the beating.
- Rub the sugar on the lemon firstAbrading a lump or coarse crystals of sugar against the whole lemon draws the oil out of the zest into the sugar, which is why the recipe insists on doing it before pounding. With granulated sugar, rub the zest into it with your fingertips until damp and fragrant, then use it as normal; the perfume is much stronger than adding grated zest at the end.
- Biscuit flourA fine, soft flour of the sort used for sweet biscuits, not anything self-raising. Modern cake flour is the closest match; plain flour works but gives a slightly tougher crumb. Half a pound is 225 g by weight, roughly 2 cups of cake flour.
- No raising agent, so the beating is the recipeThere is no baking powder or soda here. All the lift comes from air worked into the butter and sugar and from the eggs, hence "beat all well together for some minutes." Cream the butter and sugar until visibly pale and add the eggs a little at a time so the mixture does not curdle. Note that the original directs beating the whole mixture, flour and currants included, for some minutes; a gentler hand with the flour at that stage will give a lighter crumb.
- Weights in modern termsFour ounces butter is one US stick (115 g); three ounces sugar is a scant half cup (85 g); a quarter pound of currants is about 3/4 cup (115 g). Eggs of the period were on average somewhat smaller than today's large eggs, so three medium is a reasonable substitution.
- Picked currantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. "Picked" means gone over for stalks and grit, which packaged fruit no longer needs. Toss them in a spoonful of the flour before folding in to keep them from sinking.
- A good ovenThe book does not quantify this; a moderate oven, in the region of 350F (175C), is a reasonable modern reading, with the mould on a low-centre shelf. Forty minutes suits a single small mould; test with a skewer at 35 minutes, since a rich egg-and-butter batter dries quickly once it is done.
- The mouldA "small mould" here means roughly a quart capacity: a 6-inch round tin, a 1 lb loaf tin, or a small fluted mould. Butter it well and dust with flour or fine crumbs, as the sugar and fruit make it prone to sticking.
- The wineTwo tablespoons of dry sherry or Madeira, listed last, with the flour and currants. Much of the alcohol bakes off, leaving a nutty oxidised note. The phrase "exclusive of the wine" means the wine's cost is not included in the tenpence; left out, the cake is simply plainer.
- YieldGenuinely small: three or four servings, best on the day it is baked or the next, sliced thin with tea.
Cassell's is full of small cakes named after royalty, generals and society figures, and Josephine Cake is generally taken to nod to Napoleon's first wife, though the dictionary itself offers no explanation and the attribution is traditional rather than documented. The cake behind the name is thoroughly English: a scaled-down pound cake with currants and a spoonful of fortified wine, of the kind kept for unexpected callers. The costing of tenpence, given "exclusive of the wine," is a reminder of how the book was used, as a household reference where a cook or mistress compared the price of one dish against another before choosing. The trick of rubbing loaf sugar against a lemon to catch the oil survived in print well into the nineteenth century.