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Vanilla Essence (Cut the sponge cakes into)
Cut the sponge cakes into three pieces lengthways, putting jam between each layer; pile upon a glass dish, and well soak them with either sherry or Maraschino. When soaked, beat up the whites of eggs to a very stiff froth; add sugar and vanilla; mask the cakes entirely over with the egg and put in a cool oven to dry; when dry, garnish with red jelly.
A Victorian trifle-under-meringue, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: no quantities, no times, and a title inherited from the entry above it on the page. The points below fill in what a modern cook needs.
- The title is a printing artefactThe title does not match the text -- The heading "Vanilla Essence" has nothing to do with these instructions, which describe a sponge-cake and meringue sweet; it appears to have been carried over from an adjacent entry. Treat it as an untitled recipe of the tipsy-cake or trifle family.
- What "sponge cakes" means hereNot a single large cake but the small individual sponges sold by the dozen — Savoy or finger sponges, the ancestors of today's trifle sponges or ladyfingers; each is split into three lengthways. The recipe gives no number, so judge by the size of your dish.
- Cool ovenA cool oven in this period is usually reckoned at somewhere around 250-275F. The meringue is being dried, not browned; allow a good while at that temperature — perhaps three-quarters of an hour — and judge by whether the shell has set crisp over the soft cake.
- Use an ovenproof dishThe instruction to pile the cakes on a glass dish predates borosilicate glass. Assemble in something you are willing to put in a low oven, or build on an ovenproof plate and transfer once cooled.
- Meringue proportionsNo quantity is given. A workable ratio is about 2 oz caster sugar per egg white, whisked to stiff peaks, with a few drops of vanilla added at the end as the recipe directs. Two or three whites should be enough to mask a dish of this size, depending on how much you have built.
- Soaking, and how far to take itSherry is the more everyday choice; maraschino is a cherry liqueur distilled from marasca cherries with their crushed stones, and much more pronounced in flavour, so use it sparingly or let it down with syrup. "Well soak" means saturated but not swimming — pooled liquid at the base will loosen the meringue as it dries.
- Red jellyMost likely redcurrant, though the recipe does not specify; warm it slightly so it can be piped or dropped in beads over the dried meringue. Add it after the dish has cooled, or it will slide.
- ServingServe the same day, at room temperature or lightly chilled. The meringue softens on standing, and a damp refrigerator will soften it faster.
Sweets like this sit at the point where the eighteenth-century tipsy cake — sponge drowned in wine and stuck with almonds — met the fashion for meringue on Victorian dessert tables. The result is a close relative of what later kitchens called queen of puddings and, in another direction, baked Alaska: a soft, spirit-soaked base masked entirely in sweetened white and set in a barely warm oven until it holds a shell. The terse style of the instructions is typical of late-nineteenth-century "high class" cookery books; the reader was assumed to know how many whites to a dish and how cool a cool oven should be, so only the sequence of operations was worth printing. The maraschino is a period marker in itself, being one of the imported liqueurs found in Victorian recipes alongside the sherry.