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Madeira Cake
Take a quarter of a pound each of butter and lard, and cream it with half a pound of sugar; add four eggs, and three or four table-spoonfuls of milk beaten a little together, and mix well. Sift one pound of flour and a tea-spoonful of baking-powder, and stir in. Add a table-spoonful of sherry or Madeira. Bake in a papered cake-tin, leaving room for rising, for about an hour and a half, and lay a couple of strips of peel on top. Probable cost, 3s.
A plain pound-cake-style batter with a heavy flour-to-fat ratio, which makes the mixing method and the tin lining more important than usual.
- The ratio needs watchingA pound of flour against half a pound of total fat and only four eggs gives a stiff batter, stiffer than most modern cakes. Add the milk gradually and expect to need more than three or four tablespoons — enough that the mixture drops reluctantly from the spoon rather than holding in a ball.
- Butter and lard togetherThe lard is there for economy and for a short, tender crumb. Modern lard is often hydrogenated and blander than the leaf lard of the period; all butter (half a pound total) works and tastes better, at the cost of a slightly firmer cake.
- Oven temperatureThe book does not name a heat. For a cake of this size and density, 325F is right; hotter and the outside sets before the centre rises. An hour and a quarter to an hour and a half, tested with a skewer in the middle.
- "A papered cake-tin"This means a tin lined with buttered paper standing above the rim, which shields the sides during the long bake. Parchment does the same job — line base and sides of a 7- to 8-inch round tin with a collar an inch or two proud of the edge.
- The peel on topTraditionally thin strips of candied citron, laid on after about twenty minutes so they sit on a partly set surface instead of sinking. Candied lemon or orange peel is the usual substitute now; citron is sold mainly at Christmas.
- Baking powder measureA teaspoonful to a pound of flour is a light hand by modern standards, which suits a close-textured cake. Do not increase it hoping for lift — the batter is too heavy to hold a large rise and will dome and crack.
- The wineA tablespoon of sherry or Madeira flavours very little in a cake this size and is optional. The cake is generally held to be named not for the wine in the batter but for the wine served alongside it.
- Yield and keepingNearer a 2½ lb cake, twelve to sixteen slices. Wrapped, it improves on the second day and keeps a week; the high flour content means it dries rather than spoils.
- "Probable cost, 3s"Three shillings, a Victorian retail estimate the book gives for comparison between recipes. It is of no use as a modern figure beyond showing that a cake with this much butter and sugar was not an everyday item.
Madeira cake takes its name not from any ingredient but, by the usual account, from the practice of serving a plain, close-crumbed cake with a glass of Madeira or sherry in the middle of the morning or after a call — a custom associated with a period when fortified Portuguese wine was a staple of the British cellar. The cake itself is a lightened descendant of the old pound cake, and versions like this one show the transition in progress: creamed fat and sugar in the traditional manner, but with a teaspoon of the chemical baking powder that reached British households from the 1840s and spread more widely over the decades that followed, cutting the labour of beating air into the eggs. Strips of candied peel on top are a common identifying mark, and the book costed its recipes and wrote for readers who kept a close eye on the household books.