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Rodon Cake
Lake two pounds of fine flour on a sheet of paper before the fire, and move it about occasionally until it is quite dry and warm. Mix a small tea-cupful of fresh yeast, or two ounces of German yeast with half a pint of lukewarm milk, stir this into a quarter of a pound of the flour, and set it to rise. When it is well risen put the remainder of the flour into a separate bowl, and mix with it a pinch of salt, six ounces of sifted sugar, the grated rind of a lemon, and an ounce of pounded bitter almonds; when these are thoroughly mixed, add twelve well-beaten eggs, and as much lukewarm milk as will form a thin dough. This will be about half a pint. Dissolve a pound of butter, and stir it in also, then add the sponge dough. Beat all briskly together for twenty minutes, then add four ounces of picked and dried currants, eight ounces of stoned raisins, and two ounces of almonds cut small. Butter a plain mould rather thickly, sprinkle chopped almonds over it, and shake off all that will not adhere. Half fill the mould with the dough, set it in a warm place to rise, and then bake in a moderate oven. If liked, half the quantity may be used, and then nine eggs will be required. Time to bake, an hour and a half. Probable cost, 4s. 6d.
A yeast-raised bundt in the German manner, and everything about the method is sound except one ingredient, which is why this page is for reading rather than baking.
- The bitter almondsAn ounce of pounded bitter almonds is the problem. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which the grinding and moistening of the dough converts to hydrogen cyanide; an ounce pounded into a single cake is well outside any range treated as tolerable today. Their sale for eating is prohibited in the United States and tightly controlled elsewhere; where they are still sold in Europe as a flavouring, it is in small packets under limits on hydrocyanic acid.
- Why baking does not settle itSome of the cyanide is driven off by heat, but the amount retained in a large, dense, enclosed crumb is not predictable in a domestic oven, and the recipe gives no blanching or boiling step at all. Use a current recipe for a yeasted bundt if you want to bake one.
- "Lake two pounds of fine flour"A printer's or scanner's error for Take. Drying and warming flour before the fire was standard practice when flour was stored in damp larders and yeast needed all the help it could get.
- German yeastFresh compressed baker's yeast, sold in blocks — the same thing still sold as fresh or cake yeast. "Fresh yeast" measured by the tea-cupful in the alternative means barm, the liquid froth skimmed from brewing ale, which has no modern equivalent on sale.
- The spongeA quarter of a pound of the flour (an eighth of the two pounds), the yeast and half a pint of milk are set to ferment first, then folded into the rich dough. With a pound of butter and twelve eggs weighing the gluten down, a pre-risen sponge gives the dough the head start it needs.
- Currants and raisins"Picked" currants means gone over by hand for stalks and grit; "stoned" raisins means seeded, as seedless varieties were not yet the default. Both jobs are done for you now.
- ScaleTwo pounds of flour, twelve eggs and a pound of butter is a very large cake — the book's own note that half quantities with nine eggs will do suggests the full recipe was meant for a household with a crowd to feed.
"Rodon" is generally traced to the German Rodonkuchen or Rodonform hat ggives us the Napfkuchen and the Gugelhupf, the form from which the American bundt pan is said to descend. The method shows what sort of cake it is: a bread dough enriched to the point of collapse, of the Central European festival type. The buttered mould dusted with chopped almonds, so that the cake turns out with a nubbled crust, is still how a Gugelhupf is prepared. The bitter almonds belonged to a period when they were sold openly by grocers as a flavouring, valued for the intense marzipan note that sweet almonds cannot give — a use that lasted into the twentieth century before regulation caught up with the chemistry, and one now filled by almond extract.