Home › The Principles of Cookery › Victoria Sandwiches, Sweet
Victoria Sandwiches, Sweet
Beat half a pound of fresh butter to cream. Work in with it half a pound of powdered white sugar, half a pound of dried flour, and a pinch of salt. Add these ingredients gradually, and beat the mixture well between every addition. Whisk four large fresh eggs, stir them into the cake, and beat again for some minutes. Butter a shallow baking-tin, pour the batter into it, and bake in a well-heated oven. Let it get cold; spread a little good jam upon one half, place the other half upon it, press the pieces together, and sift powdered white sugar on the top. Cut the cake into long fingers with a sharp knife, pile these crosswise on a glass dish, and they will be ready for serving. Time to bake the cake, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A pound-cake batter with no leavening at all, so the whole thing hinges on how much air you beat in. Everything else is straightforward.
- The hinge: creamingThere is no baking powder here. The rise comes entirely from air whipped into the butter and sugar and from the eggs, which is why the recipe insists on beating well between every addition. Butter at about 65F, ten minutes of creaming, and eggs added slowly enough not to curdle the mixture.
- WeightsHalf a pound is 8 oz (225 g) each of butter, sugar and flour, with four eggs. Victorian eggs ran smaller than modern ones on average, so four modern large eggs are in the right region, if perhaps slightly generous. The butter, sugar and flour are in equal weights, pound-cake fashion.
- "Powdered white sugar"In this period that means granulated sugar ground fine, i.e. what we call caster sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar cut with cornstarch. Caster sugar in the batter; for the dusting on top, either works.
- "Dried flour"Flour was warmed by the fire or in a cool oven to drive off damp before baking. Modern bagged flour needs nothing beyond sifting; use plain all-purpose.
- "A well-heated oven"No temperature is given; somewhere around 375F is a reasonable modern equivalent. Twenty minutes is credible only in a genuinely shallow tin — the batter should sit no more than about three-quarters of an inch deep, so something on the order of a 9x13 in or 12x8 in tin. A deeper tin will need longer at a lower heat.
- Splitting itThe cake is baked as one sheet, cooled, then cut across into two equal pieces, one spread with jam and the other laid on top. The recipe specifies only 'good jam', though raspberry is the flavour usually associated with the cake. Cool completely or the jam will soak through and the fingers will not hold their shape.
- Yield and servingA 9x13 sheet gives roughly 20 fingers, each about three inches long. They are meant to be piled log-cabin fashion on a glass dish for the tea table, and they stale quickly — eat within a day.
The Victoria sandwich takes its name from Queen Victoria and is generally associated with the fashion for afternoon tea that spread through English middle-class households in the second half of the nineteenth century, when a light cake that could be cut into neat pieces and eaten without a fork suited the occasion. Cassell's gives it as a plain shallow sheet of equal-weight pound cake, split, jammed, dusted with sugar and cut into fingers — not the tall round two-layer cake with a fat seam of buttercream that now carries the name in British baking competitions. The absence of any chemical raising agent is worth noting; baking powder was commercially available by the time this book appeared, but many recipes of the period still relied on well-creamed butter and thoroughly whisked eggs. The probable cost is given as 1s. 6d.