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Five Eggs (Grated rind of one Lemon)
Grated rind of one Lemon.
Cream the butter well. Add the sugar, and cream again. Add all the other ingredients except the almonds, pistachio nuts, eggs and bakingpowder; then add the eggs one at a time, beating each one well in. When all are well mixed in, add the almonds and pistachio kernels cut in strips, and lastly the baking-powder. Bake in a shallow tin or sauté-pan for one hour and a half in a moderate oven.
This is the method half of a five-egg cake in the pound-cake family; the printed ingredient list has been lost in the page break, so the quantities below the title are all that survive. Read it as a technique to follow rather than a formula to weigh out.
- The missing ingredientsOnly the five eggs and the lemon rind are named. The method names butter, sugar, almonds, pistachios, eggs and baking powder, and refers to "all the other ingredients" without listing them, so flour and any flavouring are implied rather than stated; no weights are given anywhere. Use a five-egg pound cake formula you already trust and apply this mixing order to it.
- Moderate oven"Moderate" is usually read today as somewhere around 325-350F (160-175C); the book itself gives no figure. For a cake baked an hour and a half in a shallow tin, the lower end is the safer reading, since a long bake at the higher heat risks drying the edges before the centre sets.
- Shallow tin or sauté-panA sauté-pan here means a shallow, straight-sided metal pan pressed into service as a cake tin; no size is given. A round tin of whatever size suits your quantities, lined with butter and paper on base and sides, does the same job, as this batter bakes long enough to catch.
- Baking powder lastThis is the hinge. The powder goes in at the very end, after the nuts, and the cake goes straight into the oven. Beating it in early, or letting the mixture stand, spends the lift before it reaches the heat.
- Creaming twiceThe instruction to cream the butter, add the sugar and cream again is deliberate. Beyond the eggs and the small lift from the baking powder, this creaming is where the cake's lightness comes from; roughly ten minutes by hand, or four to five in a stand mixer on medium, gets the mixture pale and light.
- Eggs one at a timeAdd them singly, beating until each disappears before the next goes in, as the recipe directs. Note that in this order the flour and other ingredients are already mixed in before the eggs, which makes the batter less likely to break than in the more familiar butter-sugar-egg-then-flour sequence.
- Pistachio kernelsCut in strips means shelled, skinned nuts split lengthways, not chopped. Blanch them briefly and rub off the papery skins for the green colour the cake is aiming at; supermarket roasted, salted pistachios are the wrong thing here.
- Doneness and yieldNinety minutes is a guide, not a rule. Test with a skewer well before the time is up and cover the top with paper if it colours early. Yield cannot be worked out here, since the quantities are missing; a cake of this richness keeps well for several days wrapped.
Books published under the banner of high-class cookery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries survive in forms that can be hard to read today; this page reads as method with the quantities stranded on the previous leaf, most likely no more than an ordinary page break. The cake itself belongs to the rich pound-cake tradition, lifted by long creaming and by eggs beaten in one at a time, with chemical baking powder added at the end as an insurance policy rather than as the main raising agent. Almonds and pistachios together are a decorator's choice as much as a cook's, the pale gold and green showing in the cut slice; pistachios are often said to have been an expensive import in Britain then, which may be part of what marks the recipe as high class rather than plain household.