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Eight Eggs (Rind of one Lemon)
Rind of one Lemon.
Beat the butter to a cream; beat the yolks and whites of the eggs separately a long time; add the sugar rubbed through a sieve and the grated lemon-peel. Beat all well together for one hour, and bake in a moderate oven.
Brioche. Ingredients for the Sponge.
Four ounces of Flour.
Half an ounce of Yeast.
Half a gill of warm Water.
Melt the yeast in the warm water, put the flour on a plate, make a hole in the centre and stir in the yeast, work it well together till a soft paste, cover it over and set it to rise in a warm place for an hour till it is double the size it was at first.
Two items have run together here: the tail end of a rich lemon cake leavened entirely by beaten egg, and the opening stage of a brioche. Neither is complete on the page, so treat both as method notes rather than working recipes.
- The missing ingredient listThe cake gives eight eggs and one lemon rind, then calls for butter, sugar and (by implication) flour that were listed on the preceding page. Victorian pound-cake proportions of this type run to roughly equal weights of butter, sugar, eggs and flour — eight eggs is about 1 lb, so 1 lb each of the others is the likely intent. That is an inference, not what the book says.
- An hour of beatingWith no baking powder, the only lift comes from air beaten into the butter and the separately whipped whites. A stand mixer does in eight to ten minutes what a hand and a wooden spoon needed an hour for; beating an hour in a machine will collapse the structure and toughen it once flour goes in.
- Fold, do not beat, at the endRead literally, 'beat all well together for one hour' would include the whipped whites. Modern practice would take the hour to apply to the butter, yolks, sugar and rind, and fold the whites (and any flour) in last with a light hand, or the aeration is lost. That reading is an inference, not what the book says.
- Sugar rubbed through a sieveSugar of the period was often sold as loaf sugar or in coarse crystals that had to be crushed and sifted, though finer sugars were also available by this date. Modern caster sugar needs no sieving; granulated will do but gives a slightly coarser crumb.
- A moderate oven350F/175C. A cake of this size in a lined and papered tin will want about an hour and a quarter; test with a skewer rather than the clock, and cover the top with paper if it colours before the centre sets.
- Half a gillA gill is a quarter of a pint. By imperial measure that makes half a gill about 2 1/2 fl oz, roughly 70 ml, of water at blood heat, no hotter. (The US gill is smaller, half a cup, which would give about 60 ml.)
- Half an ounce of yeastThis means fresh compressed yeast, roughly 14 g. Substitute about 5 g (1 1/2 teaspoons) of active dry or 4 g of instant. Instant yeast can be stirred straight into the flour rather than dissolved.
- The sponge is stage one onlyFour ounces of flour is about 115 g — a small ferment, not the whole dough. It is meant to be worked into a much larger quantity of flour, butter and eggs given further on. An hour in a warm place to double is right; in a cold kitchen it will take longer, and a slower rise improves the flavour.
Cakes raised by nothing but beaten egg were common on the English cake table before chemical leaveners became reliable and cheap, though yeast-raised cakes persisted alongside them, and the long beating in this recipe is the whole technique. The lemon rind is doing the work that vanilla or almond does now — the perfume of a rich cake, cheap enough by 1900 and strong enough to carry through a pound of butter. The brioche that follows marks the other end of the book's ambitions. It is a French dough, generally traced to Normandy and long associated with Paris bakers, and its two-stage method — a small yeast sponge started first, then worked into a far richer dough — is still one of the ways it is made, though direct methods are also common. Its presence in a British "high class" manual reflects the period's assumption that a good cook worked in the French idiom, or at least could be seen to.