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Ribbon Cake
Mix well together half a pound of butter, one pound of castor sugar, half a pint of milk, four eggs, one pound and a half of flour, a tea-spoonful of cream of tartar, and half a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda. Divide the mixture into three parts. To one part add a cupful of raisins, picked carefully over, two table-spoonfuls of golden syrup, a quarter of a pound of chopped lemon-peel, and a tea-spoonful each of ground cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg. Bake each part in a shallow round tin, and when they are done, and while still hot, place the cake with the fruit in it between the two others, putting white of egg between them to make them stick together. Sprinkle white icing sugar on top.
RIBS OF BEEF, TO CARVE. (See BEEF, RIBS OF, TO CARVE.)
A three-layer Victorian butter cake in which only the middle layer is fruited and spiced, so the cut slice shows a dark band between two pale ones. The measurements are generous by modern standards and the method assumes shallow tins and a coal oven.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Shallow layers of this kind want a moderate oven, 350F, for roughly 25 to 30 minutes each, until a skewer comes out clean and the edges shrink from the tin.
- Tins"A shallow round tin" is not sized in the book; a sandwich tin around 8 inches across and an inch and a half deep is a reasonable modern equivalent, though this is a large quantity of batter and may want bigger or deeper tins. Three of them, greased and base-lined, let you bake all the layers at once.
- Half a pint of milkThis is an imperial half-pint, 10 fluid ounces, or about 1 1/4 US cups. The original simply says to mix everything together; if you use the modern creaming method instead, add the milk alternately with the flour so the batter is less likely to curdle.
- Ingredient namesCastor sugar is superfine sugar; carbonate of soda is baking soda; icing sugar here is confectioners' sugar, simply dusted over the top rather than made into a glaze. Chopped lemon-peel means candied peel, not fresh zest.
- The leaveningA teaspoon of cream of tartar with half a teaspoon of soda is a home-mixed baking powder, roughly equivalent to two teaspoons of modern double-acting powder. Mix it through the flour and get the cakes into the oven promptly, since the acid and soda react on contact with the milk.
- The fruited thirdGolden syrup, spices and candied peel all darken that portion, so it will bake a little slower than the plain layers. Toss the raisins in a spoonful of the measured flour to keep them from sinking.
- The fillingRaw egg white brushed between hot layers gets no real cooking and is best skipped; warmed apricot jam or a thin buttercream holds the stack just as well and slices more cleanly.
- YieldA pound and a half of flour makes a substantial cake, three 8-inch layers serving twelve to sixteen. It keeps several days wrapped.
Ribbon cake was a familiar form of late nineteenth-century layer baking on both sides of the Atlantic, and the name describes the effect rather than any regional tradition: a single batter divided, one part darkened with fruit, syrup and spice, then stacked so the cut face shows stripes. It belongs to the same decorative impulse as Neapolitan cake and marble cake, both of which appear in household manuals of the same decades, and it sits alongside two things becoming widely available in ordinary kitchens by then, cheap chemical leavening and matched tinware in standard sizes. Abram Lyle's works made golden syrup a household name from the 1880s, though the term was in use before that, so its presence here cannot be used to date the entry. Cassell's was issued and reissued in parts and revised volumes from the 1870s onward. The stray cross-reference to carving ribs of beef at the end is an artifact of the dictionary format, where recipes sat in strict alphabetical order and one entry ran straight into the next.