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Eight Eggs (Half a pound of Walnuts)
Half a pound of Walnuts or Almonds.
One teaspoonful of Baking-powder.
One teaspoonful of Vanilla Essence.
Beat the butter and sugar to a cream, then add the flour, sifted, and mix well; add the walnuts or almonds chopped, and lastly the whites only of the eight eggs, whipped to a stiff froth. Bake in a moderate oven for one hour. (283)
A white nut cake of the silver-cake family, printed here in the abbreviated style these books used — the quantities of butter, sugar and flour have dropped out of the entry, so this is a method to follow rather than a formula to weigh out blind.
- Missing quantitiesOnly the nuts, baking powder, vanilla and the eight egg whites are given. The butter, sugar and flour are genuinely absent from the text and cannot be reconstructed with confidence; comparable Victorian white cakes of this size run to roughly equal weights of butter and sugar with somewhat more flour, but that is inference, not the book's instruction.
- Whites onlyEight large egg whites come to about 1 cup (240 ml). The yolks are not used here at all — plan a custard, curd or mayonnaise for them the same day.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" is conventionally read as about 350F (175C). An hour at that heat suits a deep tin, but no tin size is given, and a shallower one will be done sooner, so test with a skewer rather than trusting the clock.
- Folding, not mixingThe whipped whites go in last and are the only leavening of consequence beyond the teaspoon of baking powder. Fold them through in two or three additions with a large spoon or spatula; beating them in, as "mix well" might suggest, collapses the froth and gives a dense, close crumb.
- Half a pound of nuts8 oz (225 g) of shelled walnut or almond kernels, roughly 1½ to 2 cups once chopped. That is a heavy load of nuts for one cake — chop them fairly fine so they suspend in the batter instead of sinking.
- Vanilla essenceRead this as vanilla extract, one teaspoon. The strength of period essences varied a good deal, so there is no reason to increase the quantity.
- Baking powderA single teaspoon is modest by modern standards because the beaten whites are doing much of the lifting. Baking powders of the period were generally single-acting, so the batter was best got into the oven promptly; the same discipline helps here.
- YieldSince the butter, sugar and flour are missing the finished size can only be estimated; a cake on this scale would cut into something like 10-12 slices and should keep for several days wrapped.
Cakes built on egg whites alone were a standing feature of late-Victorian and Edwardian baking, where they went under names such as silver cake or white cake, and existed in part because the well-run kitchen was constantly left with surplus yolks from custards, sauces and rich pastry — and, just as often, surplus whites from the reverse. Encyclopaedic collections of this sort tended to print whole families of such recipes in sequence, and it may well be that each entry carried over the basic proportions from the one above and listed only what changed; that would explain why this page begins mid-list with the walnuts and why its title is simply the number of eggs. The choice of walnuts or almonds was practical as much as decorative: a nut-filled white cake gave a plain, pale, sliceable cake for the tea table without the spice and dried fruit of the heavier festival cakes.