Home › The Principles of Cookery › Venetian Cake
Venetian Cake
Blanch, dry thoroughly, and pound to a smooth paste seven ounces of sweet almonds and one ounce of bitter almonds. Whilst pounding, add a few drops of orange-flower water to keep the almonds from oiling. Mix a pound of flour with the almonds, and break into the mixture half a pound of firm cool butter. Rub four or five large lumps of sugar upon the rind of a lemon. Crush this to powder, and put with it additional sugar to make up the weight to half a pound. Work all the ingredients to a smooth paste with the well-beaten yolks of three large eggs or four small ones. Roll the paste to the thickness of a quarter of an inch, place it on a baking-sheet, and bake in the oven till it is firm and lightly and equally browned. Take it out, let it get cold, and divide it into six or seven portions of equal size. Spread jam of different colours upon all of these but one and lay them one upon the other, placing the one without jam upon the top. Ice the top of the cake, and ornament with coloured sugar. By way of variety, instead of cutting the cake into portions of an equal size, cut a large piece for the bottom, and the remainder gradually smaller and smaller, so that when the slices are placed one upon another a border an inch deep may be left round each. This border may be ornamented with jam of different colours.
This is a layered almond shortbread built on a Victorian pastrycook's habit of using bitter almonds for flavour. That one ingredient puts the recipe out of reach; the notes below explain why, and what the other period details mean.
- The bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are crushed and wetted — exactly what pounding to a paste does. A full ounce, roughly 25-30 g and on the order of two dozen kernels, is enough to put the whole cake past any sensible margin of safety, particularly as it is only briefly baked and eaten cold in slices.
- Baking does not make it safeSome of the volatile cyanide is driven off by heat, but the amount lost depends on moisture, thickness and time, none of which this recipe controls. A quarter-inch sheet baked "till firm" cannot be relied on to destroy it.
- You will not find the ingredient anywayUnprocessed bitter almonds are not generally sold for eating in the UK, the EU or the US, and are restricted where they are available at all. What survives on shelves is bitter almond extract, produced under controls that remove the cyanide, and it is not a spoon-for-spoon stand-in for a weighed quantity of nuts.
- No corrected version hereRebalancing the almonds would amount to writing a different recipe. If you want a layered almond paste cake of this kind, work from a current recipe with modern flavourings.
- What the orange-flower water was forA few drops of liquid kept the almonds from "oiling" — separating into paste and oil under the pestle. It is a genuine technique, and the reason many period almond pastes are worked with rosewater or orange-flower water rather than dry.
- Sugar rubbed on the rind"Large lumps of sugar" means loaf sugar, broken from a cone. Dragging the hard lump over a lemon stripped the zest oil into the sugar, which was then crushed to powder — the Victorian equivalent of zesting straight into caster sugar.
The recipe belongs among the almond pastes and "cakes" of the confectioner rather than the baker: no raising agent, no liquid but egg yolk, and a texture closer to shortbread than sponge. The name appears to be decorative rather than geographical. The stacked jam layers and the stepped variant with an inch-deep border of coloured preserve belong to the late-Victorian dessert table, where a cake was expected to be looked at before it was cut. The bitter almonds are equally of their period: until well into the twentieth century they were an ordinary shelf item in a confectioner's store, used in small weighed quantities to sharpen the flavour of sweet almonds, and their toxicity was understood as a matter of dose rather than prohibition.