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Madeira Cake
½ pound white sugar ½ pound Five Roses flour ¼ pound butter 1 tablespoon baking powder 1 teacup milk 2 eggs.
Beat eggs and butter separate, then add sugar. Beat well together, then stir in the flour, milk and baking powder.
Put in a well-greased tin and bake about 1½ hours in moderate oven.
A plain English butter cake in imperial weights, written for a cook who knew what her own teacup held. Two numbers need attention before you start: the baking powder and the baking time.
- The weights in cups½ pound sugar is about 1¼ cups granulated; ½ pound flour is about 1¾ cups spooned and levelled; ¼ pound butter is 1 stick (½ cup). Weighing is closer to the original intent than measuring by volume.
- A teacup of milkA teacup in Canadian and British books of this period is roughly 6 fl oz, not the 8 oz of a modern measuring cup. Use ¾ cup and hold back a spoonful if the batter looks loose.
- Cut the baking powderA full tablespoon (3 teaspoons) to 1¾ cups of flour is around half again as much as a modern cake would use, and period baking powders may have been weaker and less consistently blended; today use 2 teaspoons. The full tablespoon risks a domed, cracked top that sinks, a coarse crumb, and a faintly metallic aftertaste.
- Moderate oven350F. For a cake of this size baked in a loaf tin, 325F is safer over a long bake, with the tin on the middle shelf.
- The time is for a deep tin1½ hours only makes sense in a deep loaf or small round tin. In an 8x4-inch loaf pan expect 55-70 minutes at 325-350F; test with a skewer at the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- Mixing order"Beat eggs and butter separate, then add sugar" is the older sequence. Creaming the butter with the sugar first, then beating in the eggs one at a time, gives better aeration and less risk of curdling, and matters more now that the baking powder has been reduced.
- What it lacksMadeira cake is normally flavoured with lemon zest and sometimes a little lemon juice; this version is entirely plain. The zest of one lemon, rubbed into the sugar, brings it in line with the usual English form.
- YieldOne 8x4-inch loaf, 8 to 10 slices. It keeps well wrapped for three or four days and slices better on the second day.
Madeira cake takes its name not from an ingredient but from what was drunk alongside it: a slice of plain buttery cake with a glass of Madeira was standard mid-morning or mid-afternoon hospitality in nineteenth-century England, and the cake kept the name long after the fortified wine fell out of fashion. It is closely related to the older English seed cake, and the two are close enough that early recipes sometimes differ only in whether caraway is added. Its appearance in the Five Roses Cook Book — the recipe collection issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to Canadian households who bought its flour — shows how thoroughly British teatime baking travelled with settlers; the book's cake chapter is full of these plain keeping cakes, which cost little, wanted no icing, and were forgiving of a wood range whose temperature the cook could only guess at.