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Savoy Cake
Weigh seven large fresh eggs, and take their weight in dried flour, and a little more than half their weight in sifted sugar. Break the eggs, and separate the yolks from the whites. Beat the former in a bowl, and add the sugar to them very gradually, together with a little grated lemon-rind, a spoonful of orange-flower or rose-water, or any other suitable flavouring. Add the flour a little at a time, and continue to beat the mixture for twenty minutes. Butter a mould, sprinkle powdered sugar upon the butter, and shake off all that will not adhere. Tie a strip of buttered paper round the top of the mould to keep the preparation from rolling down the sides whilst it is being baked. Pour in the cake, and three-parts fill the mould with it. When done enough let it stand for a few minutes, then shake it well to loosen it, and turn it out carefully. This cake makes very good jam sandwiches. Time to bake, an hour and a quarter or a little more. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A fatless whisked sponge baked in a tall fluted mould. The instructions as printed have one significant gap, so read the first point before you start.
- The missing whitesThe recipe separates the eggs and then never returns to the whites. In other versions of this cake they are whisked to a firm snow and folded in at the very end, after the flour. Without them the batter has very little lift, since there is no chemical raising agent.
- Weighing by eggsCassell's means whole eggs in the shell. Seven eggs of about 2 oz / 57 g each come to roughly 14 oz / 400 g, though eggs sold as large today can run heavier, so weigh yours. That gives the same weight again in flour and a little over half in sugar, around 225 g -- a very large cake by present standards, and more flour relative to sugar than many later Savoy recipes use. Halving the whole thing is reasonable.
- Dried flourFlour was warmed by the fire and sifted to drive off damp before being folded into a sponge, since cold clammy flour knocks the air out. Sift it twice; there is no need to dry modern packaged flour.
- Twenty minutes of beatingThat is a hand-whisk instruction. A stand mixer will bring yolks, sugar and flavouring to the pale ribbon stage in five to eight minutes. The flour should then be folded, not beaten, or the sponge will toughen.
- The mouldA Savoy mould is a tall, deep, fluted or turbanned tin. A kugelhopf or plain deep ring tin does the same job. Butter it and dust with caster sugar rather than flour, which is what gives the cake its thin crisp shell.
- OvenBake at 325-350F / 165-175C. An hour and a quarter suits a full-sized mould; test with a skewer from about 55 minutes and cover the top with paper if it colours early. The paper collar in the original is doing the same work.
- FlavouringsOrange-flower water is still sold and is potent, so a teaspoon is plenty. Rose-water varies enormously in strength between brands; taste before committing.
- Turning outLet it settle only a few minutes, as the recipe says. A fatless sponge left to cool in the tin will steam and stick to the flutes.
- YieldA full quantity gives a large cake, enough for twelve to sixteen. "Jam sandwiches" here means the cake split horizontally and spread with jam.
The gateau de Savoie is one of the founding fatless sponges of French pastry, and it is traditionally traced to the court of Savoy in the fourteenth century, a story usually attached to Amadeus VI and told without much documentary support. What is certain is that by the eighteenth century it was a standard of the French repertoire, valued because it rose on beaten egg alone at a time when chemical raising agents were unavailable; the cake takes its name from Savoy, and the tall fluted mould it is baked in came to be called a Savoy mould after the cake. The weights are taken from the eggs themselves, so the proportions can be reproduced without scales calibrated to any particular standard, a habit of measuring that survives in the pound cake and the French quatre-quarts.