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Brandy Cake
6 ozs. (3/4 cup) butter 1½ ozs. (11/½ cups) sugar 2 eggs 3/4 lb. (3 cups) flour 3 gills (1½ cups) milk 2 heaping teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 gill (1/2 cup) brandy Beat the butter and sugar to a cream, then add the yolks of the eggs, beating them well in, the milk, flour, baking powder, brandy, and the whites of eggs beaten stiffly.
A plain butter cake with brandy standing in for part of the flavouring. The original gives no pan, no oven temperature and no baking time, which is where most of the work of interpretation lies.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so 3 gills of milk is 1½ cups and 1 gill of brandy is ½ cup, which is what the parentheses in the original print.
- Weigh, don't scoopThe weights are the reliable figures: 6 oz butter, 12 oz sugar, 12 oz flour. Twelve ounces of granulated sugar is closer to 1¾ cups than the 1½ printed, and 12 oz of modern all-purpose flour runs nearer 2¾ cups. Trust the ounces.
- OvenNone is stated. A cake of this richness wants a moderate oven, 350F. In a covered earthenware casserole the batter steams rather than browns, so bake it uncovered.
- Time and panIn a greased and floured 9-inch tube pan or two 8½ x 4½ loaf pans, allow 50 to 65 minutes, testing with a skewer from about 45 minutes. A single deep casserole will take longer and bake unevenly.
- What is missingThere is no salt and no other flavouring. Half a teaspoon of salt sharpens the whole thing without contradicting the recipe; the brandy is meant to carry the aroma on its own.
- Order of mixingThe instruction lists milk before flour, but the cake behaves far better if the flour and baking powder are sifted together and added alternately with the milk and brandy, beginning and ending with flour. Fold the stiff whites in last and do not beat them down.
- The brandyHalf a cup is a large proportion of thin liquid for this batter. Some alcohol cooks off but by no means all, and the finished cake tastes distinctly of spirit — it is the point of the recipe, not a background note.
- YieldAbout 12 to 16 slices. It keeps well wrapped for several days and the brandy flavour settles and improves after a day.
Marion Harris Neil's casserole book belongs to a wave of English and American cookery writing that promoted covered earthenware and fireproof china as an economical, all-in-one way of cooking. A cake sits slightly oddly in such a volume, and its presence says little about casserole technique — the batter is a conventional creamed butter cake of the kind that filled every general cookbook of the period, distinguished only by its spirit. Brandy in cakes was long-standing practice in British baking, used both as flavour and, in richer fruit cakes, as a preservative; here it does the work that vanilla or lemon does elsewhere. The quantity of baking powder — two heaping teaspoons to three cups of flour — is close to the ordinary ratio of the decades after chemical leavening became cheap and reliable, when recipes that a generation earlier would have called for yeast or laboriously beaten eggs were rewritten around the tin of powder on the shelf.