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Four Eggs (Vanilla flavouring)
Vanilla flavouring.
Beat the butter and sugar well together, add the grated chocolate, previously dissolved in a tablespoonful of milk; add the eggs one by one, mixing each carefully. Mix the flour, rice, and baking-powder together, sift them through a sieve to the eggs. Pour this mixture into a sauté-pan, and bake in a moderate oven for one hour.
This is one of a run of cakes in the book indexed by the number of eggs, and the quantities for everything else were given in a margin or heading that does not travel with the method. What survives is a chocolate-and-ground-rice butter cake built on the old four-egg proportion.
- Missing quantitiesThe text gives no weights. On the standard four-egg proportion of the period the cake would take about 6 oz each butter and caster sugar, 5 oz flour with 1 oz ground rice, 1 to 2 oz grated chocolate and a teaspoon of baking powder. Treat that as a reconstruction, not as the author's figures.
- Ground rice"Rice" here means ground rice or rice flour, not cooked grains. It shortens the crumb and dries the cake slightly; fine rice flour is the nearest modern substitute, though ground rice is usually a slightly coarser grind.
- The chocolateGrated cooking chocolate of the period was a block product, often less sweet than modern eating chocolate. A tablespoon of milk will not dissolve it cold — warm the two together over low heat until smooth, then cool to lukewarm before beating it into the butter and sugar, or the mixture will curdle.
- Sauté-panA shallow straight-sided metal pan, used here simply as a cake tin. An 8-inch round tin, buttered and lined, is the modern equivalent.
- Moderate oven350F / 175C. If your reconstructed batter fills the tin only an inch or so deep, an hour is too long: start testing at 35 minutes and expect 40 to 45.
- Vanilla flavouringThe heading refers to vanilla essence; the recipe gives neither a quantity nor a point at which to add it. A teaspoon beaten in with the eggs is a reasonable guess. Essence strength varied a good deal, so taste rather than assuming a modern equivalence.
- Sifting onto the eggsThe dry ingredients go in last, sifted over the wet mixture and folded through, as the text directs.
- YieldOn the reconstructed quantities, something in the region of a 1 1/2 to 2 lb cake. It keeps better than a plain sponge and is at its best the day after baking.
Nineteenth-century cake chapters were often organised by egg count rather than by name, a habit inherited from the pound cake, where a pound each of butter, sugar, flour and eggs set the ratio and the cook scaled up or down by the egg. "Four Eggs" is a size as much as a title, with only the variation — here chocolate and vanilla — spelled out in the method. Grated chocolate as a cake ingredient became practical in Britain only after mid-century, when block eating and cooking chocolate was widely and cheaply sold; before that it was most often a drink, though it had already appeared in creams, puddings and biscuits. Ground rice, meanwhile, was a cheap stiffener in Victorian cake making, and the direction to bake in a sauté-pan is a reminder of how readily pans were put to several uses.