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Modena Cake
The lightness of this cake depends greatly on the mixing and beating together of the ingredients. Warm six ounces of butter before the fire until it is as soft as cream. Beat into it half a pound of flour, and the same of finely-sifted sugar. Have ready whisked half a dozen eggs (they should be whisked from ten to fifteen minutes). Work the flour and sugar gradually and smoothly with the eggs. Add grated lemon-peel and thinly-sliced candied orange-peel to flavour; and lastly, beat briskly into the mixture as much carbonate of soda as will cover a shilling. Put the cake quickly into the oven, which should be moderately heated. The tin should be lined with a buttered paper. Time, ten to fifteen minutes to beat eggs; to bake, one hour.
A whisked-egg butter cake of the pound-cake family, leavened almost entirely by air. The weights are straightforward; the two things that need translating are the soda measure and the oven.
- Quantities6 oz (170 g) butter, 8 oz (225 g) flour, 8 oz (225 g) caster sugar, 6 eggs. Plain flour, not self-raising, since the soda is added separately.
- "As much carbonate of soda as will cover a shilling"A shilling was about 24 mm across, so the intended dose is small — on the order of a quarter teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. Do not round it up: there is no acid in the batter to neutralise it, and excess soda tastes soapy and browns the crumb grey.
- Butter "as soft as cream"Warmed by the fire until spreadable and glossy but not melted, roughly 20°C. Melted butter will not hold the air and the cake sinks.
- Beating the eggsTen to fifteen minutes by hand with a whisk; a stand mixer on high will do it in appreciably less time — judge by the eggs, which should pale, rise greatly in volume, and fall from the whisk in a ribbon that holds a moment on the surface.
- Moderate ovenConventionally rendered as about 350°F / 175°C. "Put the cake quickly into the oven" matters: have the tin lined and the oven up to temperature before the last beating, so the beaten-in air is not lost while you wait.
- The tinAn 8-inch round tin or a 2 lb loaf tin. "Buttered paper" means baking parchment, buttered, lining base and sides — this batter is rich enough to catch.
- Timing and testAn hour is right for an 8-inch tin, but check from 50 minutes; a skewer should come out clean and the cake should have begun to shrink from the paper.
- PeelZest of one lemon, and perhaps 1–2 oz candied orange peel sliced thin; the recipe gives no quantities. Pat the peel dry and toss it in a little of the flour so it does not sink.
- YieldAbout ten slices. It keeps well wrapped for three or four days and improves on the second day.
Victorian cake names frequently borrowed the prestige of Italian and Iberian towns without much geographic warrant — Madeira cake contains no Madeira, and Modena cake has no documented connection to the city beyond a pleasant sound and the general period fashion for citrus-and-candied-peel cakes styled as continental. Structurally this is a near relation of the English pound cake, where equal weights of flour, sugar, butter and egg were beaten together and raised by air alone; the pinch of carbonate of soda here marks the transition period after chemical leaveners reached domestic kitchens in the mid-nineteenth century but before baking powder had entirely displaced plain soda in recipe books. That the recipe opens by insisting the lightness "depends greatly on the mixing and beating" is telling: it is offered less as a particular cake than as a lesson in aeration, the skill on which the whole family of butter cakes rested.