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Magdalen Cake
Beat well ten fresh eggs, and again beat with them eight ounces of finely-powdered sugar. Beat six ounces of butter to a cream, and mix the eggs very gradually with it; lastly, add, lightly and at intervals, steadily stirring the mixture, eight ounces of fine flour, well dried. Blanch and slice thinly two ounces of sweet almonds, and the same of candied orange-peel. Stir the orange-peel into the mass, but scatter the almonds over the inside of a buttered cake-tin, which fill with the mixture, putting more almonds over the top. The cake should be put into the oven quickly. Time, about one hour to bake; half an hour to beat the mixture. Probable cost, 2s.
A rich, egg-leavened butter cake with no baking powder in it — every bit of lift comes from air beaten into the eggs and butter. Everything below follows from that.
- The hinge: nothing but airThere is no chemical raising agent, so the half-hour of beating is structural, not decorative. In a stand mixer, beat the eggs and sugar on high until pale and tripled and holding a ribbon (8-12 minutes), cream the butter separately until very light, and combine slowly; fold the flour in by hand in three additions so the foam survives.
- "Put into the oven quickly""Put into the oven quickly" most likely means without delay rather than into a fierce oven, though the period use of "quick oven" for a hot one leaves it ambiguous. Have the tin buttered, almonds scattered and the oven up to temperature before the flour goes in — the batter starts deflating the moment it stands.
- Oven settingCassell's gives none. For an hour's bake on a cake of this richness, 350F (175C) in a modern oven is right; check at 45 minutes with a skewer and tent with foil if the almond top is colouring fast.
- Egg sizeVictorian eggs generally ran smaller than today's. Ten of them is closer to eight or nine modern large eggs; going by weight, aim for about 14-15 oz of shelled egg.
- Flour "well dried"Flour was stored in damp larders and warmed before the fire to drive off moisture and lighten it. Modern bagged flour needs nothing; just sift it, and use plain (all-purpose) flour, not self-raising.
- Sweet almondsSimply the ordinary edible almond, named to distinguish it from the bitter almond then sold for flavouring. Blanch by covering with boiling water for a minute, slipping off the skins, and slicing thin while still damp.
- Candied orange-peelBuy whole candied peel and dice it yourself if you can; the pre-chopped kind is often dry and bitter. Toss the pieces in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink through the loose batter.
- Tin and yieldThe ingredients come to roughly 2 lb 8 oz of batter — a deep round tin of 8-9 inches, buttered and lined on the base, with the sliced almonds pressed onto the buttered sides. Cuts into 10-12 slices.
- Probable costTwo shillings in the 1870s was a real outlay for a household cake, most of it in the ten eggs and the imported almonds and peel — worth knowing when the recipe reads as extravagant with the eggs.
Magdalen cake is the English form of the French gâteau à la Madeleine, and it probably belongs to the same family as the small shell-moulded madeleine, though here it is baked as one large cake. The name is generally traced to a cook or confectioner called Madeleine in the Lorraine region, a story repeated in cookery books since the nineteenth century but never firmly documented. What makes the recipe recognisably of its period is the method: ten eggs beaten for half an hour, an almond-lined tin, and not a grain of baking powder, which was commercially available in Britain by the 1870s. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery was compiled for middle-class households running on servant labour, and half an hour of arm-work was a cost the book could assume its readers would pay.