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Manx Cake
Rub off the peel from half a large lemon on lumps of sugar; ascertain the weight of sugar, and add as much more of pounded sugar as will make eight ounces in all. Mix the pounded sugar with eight ounces of rice-flour. Beat eight eggs until they are free from stringiness; dissolve the lumps of sugar in the beaten eggs, and mix them gradually with the flour. When these ingredients are well beaten together, bake in a buttered tin. Time, thirty minutes to bake; to beat the eggs, twenty-five to thirty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. for this quantity.
A whisked sponge with no raising agent and no fat in the batter: everything depends on the air beaten into the eggs. Rice flour gives it a fine, slightly sandy crumb rather than the springiness of a wheat sponge.
- Rubbing the peelRubbing sugar lumps against the lemon until they are yellow and saturated with oil is a genuinely effective way to extract zest oil, and worth doing. Finely grated zest from half a lemon stirred into the sugar gives much the same result in a minute.
- The sugar arithmeticThe lumps that took up the peel are weighed, then topped up with pounded (caster) sugar to 8 oz total — about 1 cup. Rice flour is likewise 8 oz, roughly 1 1/2 cups, so the cake is equal weights of sugar and rice flour, plus eight eggs.
- Eight eggsVictorian eggs are generally reckoned to have run smaller than today's large ones; six to seven large eggs, about 12 oz out of shell, is probably nearer the quantity meant. Whole eggs are used, not separated.
- Beating timeTwenty-five to thirty minutes is the hand-whisk figure. In a stand mixer, whole eggs with sugar reach the ribbon stage in 8-12 minutes: the batter should fall in a trail that sits on the surface for several seconds.
- Folding in the flourThis is the hinge. Once the eggs are at ribbon stage the rice flour must be folded in gently and "gradually" — the instruction to beat it well together will flatten the foam if taken literally with a mixer, and there is no baking powder to rescue it.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven heat, only a thirty-minute bake in a buttered tin. For a sponge of this size a modern moderate oven, 350F/175C, is a reasonable reading; a buttered 8-inch round or square tin suits thirty minutes. Test with a skewer and expect the top to be pale gold and just shrinking from the sides.
- Yield and keepingServes eight to ten. Fatless rice-flour sponges stale quickly and are best eaten the day they are baked, plain or with fruit and cream.
- The cost lineOne shilling and twopence was the retail cost when the book was compiled, given so a cook could price a dish for the household accounts. It has no modern equivalent worth quoting.
Rice flour entered British baking in quantity during the nineteenth century, when imported and home-milled ground rice became cheap and was praised for producing a close, delicate crumb in sponges, biscuits and puddings — it also stretched or replaced wheat flour when that was dear. The lemon-on-sugar-lumps method the recipe opens with was one Victorian way of capturing zest oil. Why it is called Manx is not documented in the book. What the recipe does record precisely is the labour behind a plain cake before mechanical beaters: half an hour of continuous whisking, by one pair of arms, for thirty minutes in the oven.