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Record Cakes
Beat together to a cream a quarter of a pound of butter and three-quarters of a pound of sugar; sift one pound of flour and one and a half tea-spoonfuls of baking-powder; beat the yolks of eight eggs into the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon; whisk the whites to a stiff froth and stir gently in: stir in the flour and baking-powder quickly and lightly; add a gill of cream flavoured with rose-water, stirring it into the flour, etc. Take three ounces of pistachio kernels and two ounces of crystallised cherries, chop them, and mix them with the other ingredients. Have ready some buttered patty-tins, place a spoonful of the mixture in each, and bake ten or fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 2s. for this quantity.
A rich egg-heavy cake batter baked in small tins — closer to a modern cupcake or friand than to a layer cake. Nothing here is difficult, but the measurements are imperial-British and the oven is left entirely to your judgement.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given at all; the recipe leaves it entirely to judgement. A moderate oven, around 350F/180C, is a reasonable modern default, and ten to fifteen minutes suits small tins at that heat; a skewer should come out clean and the tops spring back.
- A gillIn a British book of this period a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, or a scant 2/3 US cup. The cream loosens what is otherwise a very stiff batter, so do not cut it back.
- Patty-tinsShallow tartlet or bun tins, roughly the size of a modern muffin cup but not as deep. A twelve-hole muffin tin filled halfway works; a mini-muffin tin gives something nearer the original scale. Expect roughly 30 to 36 small cakes from this quantity.
- The order of mixingThe recipe folds the whisked whites in before the flour, which is the reverse of modern practice and will knock much of the air out. Folding the flour and baking powder in first, then the whites, then the cream, gives a lighter crumb and costs nothing.
- Butter to sugarThree-quarters of a pound of sugar to a quarter-pound of butter is very sweet by current taste, and the eight yolks are doing most of the enriching. The batter will not cream to a fluffy paste — it stays sandy until the yolks go in.
- Pistachio kernelsBuy them shelled and unsalted. Blanching them briefly in boiling water and rubbing off the skins brings up the green colour, though the recipe does not ask for it; salted cocktail pistachios will ruin the cakes.
- Rose-waterStrength varies enormously between brands. Start with a teaspoon in the cream, taste, and add more — modern concentrates can easily turn a cake soapy, and a Victorian distilled rose-water was likely gentler.
- Crystallised cherriesGlacé cherries are the direct descendant. Rinse off the syrup and dry them before chopping, or they will sink and leave wet pockets.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery ran to thousands of entries and cheerfully padded its alphabet with named variants of a handful of basic batters; "Record Cakes" is one of these — a plain rich cake mixture distinguished only by its pistachios, cherries and rose-water. The name is not explained in the book and no source ties it to a particular person or occasion. What the recipe does record is the late-Victorian appetite for small individual cakes baked in patty-tins, which spread quickly once chemical baking powder became cheap and reliable in the second half of the nineteenth century and freed the domestic cook from yeast and long beating. Rose-water flavouring was by then a survival from an older English tradition, gradually being displaced by vanilla and lemon; the pistachios and crystallised cherries mark this as a company cake rather than an everyday one.