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Russian Walnut Cake
Beat the yolks of ten eggs to a froth with one pound of sifted sugar; peel and pound two pounds of walnuts, and add them to the eggs, then add the grated rind of a lemon. Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, and add them lastly to the mixture. Butter a cake-tin, and strew over the butter three-quarters of a tea-cupful of manna (which can be bought by the ounce at the chemist's or the Civil Service Stores); pour in the mixture, and bake for about an hour in a moderately hot oven. Leave the cake in the tin till it is cold. Probable cost, 2s. 6d.
A flourless walnut torte of the Central European type, but with one instruction that cannot be followed today as printed.
- The manna is the problemThe recipe sends you to the chemist to buy manna by the ounce, which in a Victorian pharmacy meant the dried sugary exudate of the manna ash (Fraxinus ornus), sold as a gentle laxative. Its active constituent is mannitol, and three-quarters of a tea-cupful is a laxative quantity of the drug to distribute through a single cake.
- Why the name is ambiguousIn Russian cookery manna krupa means semolina, which would make perfect sense strewn over a buttered tin to stop the batter sticking. The parenthesis about the chemist's counter points the other way, and there is no way to tell from the text which the author meant. That ambiguity alone is reason not to work from this version.
- What to use insteadA current recipe for walnut torte should be used. Do not attempt to reconstruct the lining step by guesswork.
- Scale of the thingTen yolks, a pound of sugar and two pounds of walnuts is an enormous quantity by modern standards, roughly a kilo and a half of mixture before the whites go in, and it needs a correspondingly large tin.
- Pounded, not choppedPounding two pounds of walnuts in a mortar produces an oily paste quite unlike food-processor crumbs, and that paste is the entire structure of the cake; there is no flour at all. Some modern versions of this style of torte add a little breadcrumb for stability.
- Old moneyTwo shillings and sixpence was a substantial outlay for a cake in the later nineteenth century, which suggests the walnuts and the ten eggs were the luxury here, not the sugar.
Cassell's collected recipes from across Europe under national labels, and "Russian" here signals the sort of flourless ground-nut torte associated with Central Europe and points east. The confusion over manna is itself a period artefact: the word covered both the sweet ash-tree exudate stocked by British chemists as a mild aperient and, in Russian usage, manna krupa, ordinary semolina. That an English compiler could print the second meaning while directing readers to the first may mean the recipe reached the book at second hand rather than from a kitchen. The mention of the Civil Service Stores, the London co-operative supply house that served government clerks and their families and was trading from the 1860s, places the entry in the later nineteenth century.