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VICTORIA CAKE (another way)
Rub the rind of two fresh lemons with sugar till the yellow part is taken off, crush the lumps to powder, and add as much powdered sugar as will make up the quantity to half a pound. Whisk the whites of three eggs to froth, stir in the sugar, and afterwards the beaten yolks of six eggs. Last of all, work in gradually and very thoroughly seven ounces of dried flour. Line a tin mould with buttered paper, pour in the batter, and bake the cake in a moderately-heated oven. When it is lightly brown, and when a skewer pushed into it will come out clean and dry, it is done enough. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A fatless lemon sponge leavened entirely by egg, with no butter and no chemical raising agent. Everything depends on how much air you keep in the eggs and how gently the flour goes in.
- The hinge: the flourSeven ounces (about 1 3/4 cups) of flour folded into a foam with no butter or baking powder is a lot to carry. Sift it and fold in thirds with a spatula, cutting down and lifting rather than stirring, or the batter deflates and bakes to a rubber pad. "Work in gradually and very thoroughly" means completely combined, not beaten.
- Dried flourPeriod recipes often direct that flour be dried before the fire or in a low oven, then sifted, before use in fine cakes. Modern bagged flour needs nothing but sifting.
- Rubbing the lemons with sugarRub sugar lumps over the zest until they turn yellow and oily, then crush them, as the recipe directs. A hard lump abrades the oil cells and the sugar absorbs the oil, which many cooks prefer to grating. With modern granulated sugar, rub the zest of two lemons into the sugar with your fingertips until it is damp and fragrant.
- "Powdered sugar"In this book that means finely ground granulated sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Use caster or ordinary granulated. Half a pound is a generous cup.
- The egg methodWhites only to a froth, not to stiff peaks, then sugar, then six beaten yolks. That is a soft, pourable batter closer to a genoise than a meringue. Modern practice would whip the yolks and sugar to the ribbon first for more reliable volume, but the original order works if the whites are not overbeaten.
- Oven'Moderately heated' is usually read as somewhere around 350F (175C). Bake on the middle shelf; the cake browns before it sets if placed too high.
- Tin and liningAn 8-inch round tin or a 2 lb loaf tin, lined with buttered parchment rather than buttered paper. The paper matters here " the cake has no fat of its own and will weld to bare metal.
- Timing and yieldExpect 35 to 45 minutes in an 8-inch tin. Cool in the tin for ten minutes before turning out; a fatless sponge is fragile while hot. Serves eight to ten, and is best eaten within a day.
- Probable cost1s. 6d. is the book's own estimate of what the ingredients cost at the time of publication. It has no modern equivalent worth quoting.
Victoria cake, Victoria sandwich and Victoria buns all cluster in later nineteenth-century English cookery books, named for the queen alongside such dishes as Albert pudding. Cassell's gives more than one version under the one heading, and this "another way" is the older type: a fatless sponge raised by egg alone, generally related to the eighteenth-century "biscuit" or savoy cake, rather than the equal-weights butter cake now sold as a Victoria sponge. The lemon-sugar rub is a survival from the era of loaf sugar, when sugar arrived as a hard cone to be nipped into lumps, and a hard lump served as a zesting tool. That the recipe carries a costing at all reflects the book's audience: households running on a fixed weekly allowance, where a cook was expected to justify six eggs.