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Portuguese Cakes
Beat half a pound of fresh butter to a cream. Add half a pound of powdered and sifted sugar, half a pound of fine flour, and the yolks of five eggs. Beat the ingredients thoroughly, and mix in gradually a table-spoonful of orange-flower water, a glass of sherry, four ounces of picked and dried currants, and last of all the whites of the eggs, which have been beaten to a firm froth. Beat the mixture for some minutes, pour it into small buttered tins, and bake in a brisk oven from fifteen minutes to half an hour, according to the size of the tins. Probable cost, 1s. 10d., exclusive of the sherry.
A pound-cake batter in the old proportions — equal weights of butter, sugar and flour — leavened by nothing but beaten egg white. Handle the whites well and the cakes rise; fold them in carelessly and you get dense, greasy little pucks.
- The hinge: the whitesThere is no baking powder or soda here, so the five beaten whites are the entire leavening. Beat them to a firm but not dry froth and fold them in with a light hand, then get the batter into the tins and into the oven promptly. The instruction to "beat the mixture for some minutes" after adding them is period practice that will knock out much of the air; a brief, thorough folding serves better.
- "A brisk oven"Brisk in Victorian usage is generally taken to mean a hot oven, somewhere in the region of 400-425F, though period usage was not standardised. That suits very small tins baked 15 minutes but will scorch anything larger before the centre sets. For patty tins or small dariole moulds, 400F is safer; for cakes needing the full half hour, 375F.
- WeightsHalf a pound is 8 oz / 225 g of each of butter, sugar and flour, with 4 oz / 115 g currants. "Fine flour" means finely milled plain white flour -- not self-raising.
- "A glass of sherry"Genuinely imprecise. A wine glass of the period held about 2 fl oz, a sherry glass rather less; 2 fl oz (60 ml) is the sensible reading. More than that and the batter loosens enough to slump.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh blackcurrants or redcurrants. "Picked" refers to sorting out stems and grit and "dried" to drying them after washing, neither of which modern packaged fruit needs. Toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour so they hold their place in the batter.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, in Middle Eastern and baking shops. A tablespoon is assertive but within range for this quantity of batter; taste your bottle first, as concentrations vary widely.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 small cakes, depending on tin size. Buttered tins mean well-buttered — this batter has no liquid to speak of and will stick. Paper cases are a reasonable substitute.
- That price1s 10d is one shilling and tenpence, for the whole batch, with the sherry excluded from the reckoning.
Cassell's appears to use "Portuguese" here much as English cookery books of the period used "Spanish" or "Naples" — as a marker of sweet richness and southern wine rather than any documented Iberian original. The tell is the sherry and the orange-flower water: fortified wine from the peninsula and distilled flower waters are generally said to have been staples of English confectionery from the seventeenth century onward, and cakes flavoured with them acquired vaguely Mediterranean names on the way. The underlying formula is plain pound cake, the workhorse of English baking, with its equal-weight proportions. Also notable is the absence of chemical leavening; by the 1890s baking powder was cheap and common, but the older method of relying on whipped egg whites survived in the finer cakes.