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ROUT CAKES, ALMOND (Read's recipe)
Take one pound of sweet almonds and one pound of loaf sugar; beat your almonds and sugar quite fine, and make it into a moderately stiff paste with the yolk of an egg. Make them into any shape your fancy may dictate. Use finely-powdered loaf sugar to dust your board or blocks. In making them, place them on clean tins that are slightly buttered, so as not to touch, or lay a sheet of whity-brown paper on the tin to put them on. Let them remain in a warm place all night, or a day and a night, before they are baked. Put them in a rather brisk oven; when lightly coloured over, they are done. Ornament them with nonpareils, candied peel, icing, etc., to fancy; make a mucilage of gum arabic, and, with a small brush, lay it over the parts where you wish the nonpareils to adhere; this is done after they are baked. If you wish to cut you wish the nonpareils to adhere; this is done after they are baked. If you wish to cut your paste out of blocks, put it in a stewpan over the fire; keep stirring it with a spoon or spaddle; stir it well to the bottom. When you find the paste does not stick to the sides of the pan, and comes altogether, it is done. Let it get cold before you cut it out. When the cakes are made in this way the impressions show much better.
This is an almond-paste sweetmeat rather than a cake in the modern sense — closer to marzipan biscuits than anything with flour or leavening. The overnight rest is the part people skip, and it is the part that makes them work.
- Dry the shaped pieces firstLeaving the shaped paste in a warm place overnight lets a skin form on the surface. That skin is what holds the shape and gives the glossy, faintly crazed top when the pieces hit the oven; bake them straight away and they slump and weep sugar.
- Oven temperatureA "rather brisk" oven is conventionally read as fairly hot, roughly 400F, but the recipe gives no temperature and the doneness cue is visual, not timed. These want colour on the surface before the interior dries out, so err on the low side and pull them the moment the tips and edges take on a light tan.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar broken from a cone and crushed as needed. Ordinary granulated sugar works for the paste; where the recipe calls for "finely-powdered loaf sugar" to dust the board, use icing sugar.
- The egg yolk is underspecifiedOne yolk will not bring two pounds of almonds and sugar together. Expect to need two or three, added one at a time, and stop as soon as the paste is stiff enough to hold an impression — too wet and it spreads in the oven.
- Almonds"Sweet almonds" is deliberate: the period distinction was against bitter almonds, which were also sold for flavouring. Use blanched sweet almonds only, ground fine, or start from a 1:1 commercial almond paste and adjust with icing sugar.
- Whity-brown paper and blocksWhity-brown was a cheap unbleached wrapping paper; parchment does the same job. The "blocks" are carved wooden moulds that stamp a pattern into the paste, which is why the second method cooks the paste first — a drier paste takes a sharper impression.
- SpaddleA spaddle is a flat wooden stirring paddle. The cue for the cooked paste is textural: it stops clinging to the pan sides and gathers into a single mass.
- Gum arabic mucilageGum arabic dissolved in a little warm water is still sold as a food-grade glaze and edible glue, and is used exactly this way by cake decorators. Applied after baking with a fine brush, it fixes nonpareils and peel without wetting the surface.
- YieldOne pound of almonds and one pound of sugar make a large quantity of paste; the exact number of cakes depends entirely on the size and mould used. The paste keeps well wrapped and chilled, so it is reasonable to halve or quarter the batch.
Rout cakes take their name from the rout, the crowded evening reception that dominated fashionable London entertaining from the late eighteenth century into the Victorian period — an event with no seated dinner, where guests circulated and ate small sweet things from trays. Confectioners supplied them in assorted shapes, and the form settled on whatever could be moulded, dried and glazed to look ornamental in quantity: almond pastes, ratafias, and sugared trifles finished with nonpareils and candied peel. By the later nineteenth century the rout itself was fading, but the cakes had outlived it as a standing item of the dessert table and the tea tray. Nothing here identifies who "Read" was, though the instruction to work the paste over the fire for stamping from blocks reads as a confectioner's technique rather than a domestic one.