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Savoury Cake
Take two large table-spoonfuls of fine flour, and mix it smoothly with four eggs, adding enough milk to make the preparation of the consistency of cream. Stir well, and add salt to taste and some finely-minced chives. Butter a shallow tin or dish, and bake till the cake is of a fine yellow.
A thin egg-and-flour batter baked flat — closer to a Yorkshire pudding or a baked omelette than to anything sweet. The original assumes a cook who knows her own oven, so the temperature and time have to be supplied.
- The consistency is the whole recipeTwo tablespoons of flour to four eggs is barely enough to bind; the milk is added by eye until the batter pours like single cream. Add it a little at a time after the flour and eggs are smooth, or you will get lumps you cannot beat out of so thin a mixture.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A batter this thin wants a fairly brisk oven; something around 375-400F should set and colour it before it dries out, and ten to fifteen minutes in a shallow tin will probably do. "A fine yellow" is most easily read as pale gold rather than browned.
- "Fine flour"Plain white flour, sifted. In nineteenth-century usage "fine" generally indicated the finest-milled white grade rather than a coarser household flour; modern all-purpose flour needs no treatment beyond a sieve.
- TablespoonfulsVictorian table-spoons were not standardised and may not correspond exactly to the modern 15 ml measure, but with only two of them the difference is negligible. Use two level modern tablespoons and judge by the batter.
- ChivesChives are the only seasoning besides salt, so use them generously; a good tablespoon, snipped fine rather than chopped. The recipe adds them with the salt, after the batter is smooth.
- The tin"A shallow tin or dish" means something like a pie plate or a small roasting tin, well buttered. Depth matters more than material: spread the batter no more than about a quarter-inch deep, or the centre stays wet while the edges set.
- Yield and servingFour eggs make a light dish for two, or a savoury accompaniment for four. Cut in squares or wedges and serve straight from the oven; it deflates and toughens as it cools.
This sits in Cassell's among the plain egg cookery of the late Victorian kitchen, where "cake" is often said to have still carried its older, wider sense of anything baked flat in a tin rather than anything necessarily sweet. The method — eggs slackened with a spoonful of flour and milk, poured thin, baked hot — has much in common with the batter pudding, the baked omelette and the Italian frittata, and it belonged to the class of quick dishes a cook could produce from the larder without meat. Chives were among the few fresh herbs reliably available from a kitchen garden or windowbox for much of the year in Britain, and they turn up often as the sole flavouring in economical egg dishes of the period.