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Rout Cakes
No. 1.--Beat half a pound of butter to cream, add half a pound of powdered sugar, one pound of flour, and half a pound of picked and dried currants. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly, and make them into a stiff paste with three eggs beaten up with a glassful of brandy and a table-spoonful of rose or orange-flower water. Sprinkle some mixed flour and powdered sugar over a baking-tin, drop the preparation upon it in small knobs, and bake these in a quick oven.
No.2.--Beat four ounces of butter to cream, and add four ounces of sugar, six ounces of dried flour, the well-beaten yolks of six eggs, and a flavouring of grated lemon, pounded almonds, and orange-flower or rose-water. Beat the mixture briskly for a few minutes, and pour it into a shallow mould lined with buttered paper. Bake in a well-heated oven. Let the cake get cold, then cut it with a very sharp knife into small fancy shapes of any kind, and moisten these with white of egg beaten up with powdered white sugar. Crisp them before the fire, and when the icing is set put them in a cool dry place till wanted.
Two quite different sweets under one name: No. 1 is a drop biscuit, No. 2 a rich yolk sponge cut into shapes and iced. Both were meant to be small, dry and sturdy enough to sit on a tray all evening.
- Quantities in metricNo. 1: 225g butter, 225g icing or caster sugar, 450g flour, 225g currants, 3 eggs. No. 2: 115g butter, 115g sugar, 170g flour, 6 egg yolks.
- "A quick oven"For No. 1, take this as somewhere around 400-450F (200-230C). These are small knobs of stiff paste and want a short, hot bake — roughly eight to twelve minutes, until just coloured at the edges.
- "A well-heated oven"No. 2 is a shallow sheet of egg-rich batter, so a moderate-to-hot oven, in the region of 375-400F (190-200C), suits it; the phrase gives no precise heat and need not imply the same fierceness as No. 1. Bake until set and lightly golden, then cool completely before cutting.
- "A glassful of brandy"Genuinely ambiguous. A wine glass of the period usually meant about 2 fl oz (60ml), but the term was used loosely; start with 2 tablespoons and add more only if the paste will not come together.
- Dried flourFlour spread on a tray and warmed in a cooling oven to drive off moisture, then sieved. Period cookery books frequently direct it. Modern packaged flour needs nothing beyond sifting.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. "Picked" means gone over by hand for stalks and grit — still worth a quick rinse and thorough drying, since wet fruit will slacken the paste.
- Rose and orange-flower waterModern bottlings vary a great deal in strength and many are stronger than the household distillations these books assume. Taste the raw paste before committing, and consider starting with a teaspoon rather than the tablespoon called for.
- The raw-egg icingWhite of egg beaten with sugar, set by "crisping before the fire," never reaches a temperature that pasteurises it. Use pasteurised egg white or meringue powder, or dry the iced shapes in an oven at its lowest setting instead.
- Yield and keepingNo. 1 gives roughly five dozen small cakes; No. 2 perhaps three dozen shapes from a swiss-roll tin. Both keep a week in a tin, which is the whole point of them.
Rout cakes take their name from the rout — the large, crowded evening reception that dominated fashionable English socialising from the later eighteenth century into the Victorian period. A rout offered no seated supper, so the food had to be small, dry and eatable standing up with a glass in the other hand: hence a stiff, brandy-scented drop biscuit or a firm sponge cut into diamonds and stars and glazed. Jane Austen puts rout-cakes on the table in Emma, which at least suggests their currency in Regency entertaining, though a single literary mention can carry only so much weight. By the time this dictionary was compiled the rout itself was largely gone, but the recipes stayed in print as useful small cakes for tea trays and dessert plates — the flavourings of rose water, orange-flower water and pounded almonds being holdovers from an older English confectionery tradition that vanilla would shortly displace.