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Cookery (Take teacupfuls of boiled rice)
Take 2 teacupfuls of boiled rice, cooled and mashed, 1 pint of milk, 1 egg, a handful of flour; season with a little salt. Have a pan of lard boiling hot; put them in and fry quickly.
Naples Biscuits.
Whisk 10 eggs till light; add to them 1 pound of dried flour and 1 of powdered sugar; beat all together till perfectly light; put in some rosewater and nutmeg, and bake in small shallow pans, in a moderately-heated oven.
Soft Gingerbread.
One pound of butter, 1/2 a pound of sugar, 10 eggs, 1 teaspoonful of cinnamon, 2 tablespoonfuls of ginger, 3 half pints of molasses, 1 gill of milk; 2 pounds of flour, 2 tablespoonfuls of saleratus.
Beat the butter, sugar, ginger, and cinnamon together until light; then stir in one-fourth of the flour; whisk the eggs very thick, and add by degrees. Mix the milk and molasses together, which stir in gradually; then the remainder of the flour, half at a time. Beat all well together, then add the saleratus, mix, and bake.
French Loaf Cake.
One pound of sugar, 1/2 pound of butter, 1 pound of flour, 7 eggs, 1 cup of cream, the grating and juice of 1 lemon, wineglass of brandy or Madeira, 1 teaspoonful of saleratus. Beat the butter and sugar very light , then stir in the cream; after which beat in one-fourth of the flour; whisk the eggs until very thick, which add by degrees, then the remainder of the flour, half at a time, alternately with the grating and juice of the lemon. After beating all well together, add the saleratus, after which beat but a few minutes. Line your pans (either square or round) with white paper, and bake in a moderate oven.
Madison Cake.
Half a pound of butter, of a pound of sugar, 1 pound of flour, 8 eggs, 1 gill of cream, 1 nutmeg, 1 pound of raisins chopped, of a pound of currants. Beat the butter and sugar until very light, to which add the cream; whisk the eggs until very thick, and stir in alternately with the flour. Beat all well together; then add the spice and fruit. Butter and paper your pans, put in the batter, spread it over smooth with a knife, and bake in a moderate oven.
Black Cake.
One pound of butter, 1 pound of sugar, 1 pound of flour, 10 eggs, 2 pounds of raisins (seeded and chopped), 2 pounds of currants (washed, dried, and picked), 1 pound of citron (cut thin and small), 1 wineglass of Madeira wine, 2 wineglasses of brandy, the grating of 1 large nutmeg, 2 teaspoonfuls of cinnamon, 1 teaspoonful of mace and cloves mixed. Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; then stir in one-fourth of the flour, whisk the eggs very thick, which add gradually; then the remainder of the flour, half at a time; after beating well, add the wine, brandy, and spice.
Then mix all the fruit together, and add one-third at a time. Beat well. Then butter and line your pan with white paper, put in the mixture, smooth it with a knife, and bake in a moderate oven, about four hours.
Sponge Cake.
Twelve eggs and their weight in sugar, and the weight of 7 eggs in flour, and the peel and juice of 1 large lemon. Separate the eggs, beat the yolks, and then add sugar until thick and light.
Whisk the whites until stiff and dry, and add with the flour. Stir sufficiently to mix the flour and whites through, but avoid beating as that will destroy the lightness. Grease your pan (either square or round) with fresh butter, and bake in a very moderate oven.
Macaroons.
One pound of pulverized sugar, the whites of 5 eggs, 1/2 a pound of sweet almonds, 1 ounce of bitter almonds. Mix the almonds, blanch and pound them quite fine; beat the eggs very dry, and add the sugar very gradually, then stir in the almonds lightly, put them on white paper with a teaspoon, about an inch apart. Bake them in a slack oven.
To make a rich Plum Cake.
Take 1 pound of fresh butter, 1 pound of sugar, 14 pounds of flour, 2 pounds of currants, a glass of brandy, 1 pound of sweetmeats, 2 ounces of sweet almonds, 10 eggs, of an ounce of allspice. and of an ounce of cinnamon.
Melt the butter to a cream and put in the sugar.
Stir it till quite light, adding the allspice, and pounded cinnamon; in a quarter of an hour take the yolks of the eggs, and work them in, two or three at a time; and the whites of the same must by this time be beaten into a strong snow quite ready to work in; as the paste must not stand to chill the butter, or it will be heavy, work in the and citron, cut in fine strips, and the currants, whites gradually; then add the orange-peel, lemon, which must be mixed in well with the sweet almonds. Then add the sifted flour and glass of brandy. Bake this cake in a tin hoop in a hot oven for three hours, and put sheets of paper under it to keep it from burning.
To make a good Plain Cake.
The following is a receipt for making a good plain cake: Take as much dough as will make a quartern loaf (either made at home or procured at the baker's), work into this a quarter of a pound of butter, a quarter of a pound of moist sugar, and a handful of caraway seeds. When well worked together, pull into pieces the size of a golden pippin, and work it together again. This must be done three times, or it will be in lumps, and heavy when baked.
Rich Pudding Pound Cake.
Boil a teacup of rice in a pint and a half of water, pour over 1 quart of milk, beat the yolks of 5 eggs, add 5 tablespoonfuls of sugar, let it come to a simmer, then pour into a pudding dish and flavor; beat the whites of 5 eggs, 5 tablespoonfuls of sugar to an icing, spread it over the top of the pudding and brown it.
A rich Seed Cake.
Take 14 pounds of flour well dried, 1 pound of butter, 1 pound of loaf sugar, beat and sifted, 8 eggs, and 2 ounces of caraway seeds, 1 grated nutmeg, and its weight in cinnamon. Beat the butter into a cream, put in the sugar, beat the whites of the eggs and the yolks separately, then mix them with the butter and sugar. Beat in the flour, spices, and seed, a little before sending it away. Bake it two hours in a quick oven.
Ratafia Cakes.
Beat 1/2 a pound each of sweet and bitter almonds in fine orange, rose, or ratafia water, mix 1/2 a pound of fine pounded and sifted sugar with the same, add the whites of 4 eggs well beaten to it, set it over a moderate fire in a preserving-pan.
Stir it one way until it is pretty hot, and when a little cool form it into small rolls, and cut it into thin cakes. Shake some flour lightly on them, give each a light tap, and put them on sugar papers, sift a little sugar on them, and put them into a thorough slack oven.
Queen Cakes.
This is a run of cake receipts printed as continuous text, and two of them — the Macaroons and the Ratafia Cakes — call for bitter almonds in quantities that cannot be made today. The notes below cover the vocabulary and oven language of the whole section, and explain why those two must be left alone.
- Bitter almonds: the reason for the warningBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are ground and wetted — exactly what these receipts do. One ounce in the macaroons is already a meaningful dose, and the ratafia cakes call for a full pound of bitter almonds beaten with rosewater and only gently heated, never baked hot enough or long enough to drive anything off. Unprocessed bitter almonds are not sold for eating in the United States. Use a current recipe if you want almond macaroons or ratafias.
- Missing fractionsThe transcription has dropped vulgar fractions throughout: "of a pound of currants," "14 pounds of flour." Read "14 pounds" in the plum cake and seed cake as 1¼ pounds, and treat every bare "of a pound" as an unrecoverable fraction — half or a quarter, but the page no longer says which. Do not guess your way through the Madison Cake or the plum cake; the proportions are genuinely incomplete.
- Oven wordsThese terms have no fixed temperature, but the usual modern equivalents are: a moderate oven around 350F, moderately heated the same or slightly under, quick around 425–450F, and slack or "thorough slack" around 275–300F. "A very moderate oven" for the sponge cake is usually read as about 325F. For the Black Cake's four hours, 300–325F is safer than 350; a ten-pound fruitcake at moderate heat will be black in fact as well as name.
- SaleratusSaleratus is baking soda, though the nineteenth-century article was often potassium bicarbonate and less reliable than modern sodium bicarbonate. Two tablespoons in the Soft Gingerbread is not a misprint — it is answering roughly three cups of molasses, which is acidic enough to need it.
- Gill, wineglass, teacupA gill is half a cup. A wineglass is about two fluid ounces. A teacup in this period runs to roughly six ounces rather than eight, which matters mainly in the two rice receipts at the head and near the end of the section.
- Dried flourFlour was warmed and dried by the fire to drive off damp before being weighed into rich cakes. Modern bagged flour needs none of this; sift and weigh it cold.
- Papered pans"Butter and paper your pans" and "line your pan with white paper" mean lining with buttered paper; use parchment today. For the Black Cake, line base and sides and set the tin on a further folded sheet, which is what the plum cake's "sheets of paper under it" is for.
- Sweetmeats and a quartern loafThe plum cake's "sweetmeats" are candied peel and preserved fruit, not confectionery. In the Plain Cake, a quartern loaf is a four-pound loaf, so that receipt is a yeasted dough enriched with butter, sugar and caraway rather than a batter cake; a golden pippin is a small apple, so the pieces are about the size of a plum.
- The rice "pudding pound cake"Despite the heading this is a rice pudding with a meringue top; the custard is brought to a simmer before the whites go on. Brown the meringue in the oven until coloured.
Mackenzie's compilation was a British book that found its real career in American reprints, and this page shows the seam: Naples biscuits and ratafia cakes are eighteenth-century English confectionery, while Madison Cake carries the name of an American president's household — the sort of patriotic renaming that attached itself to pound cake receipts in the early republic, generally traced to Dolley Madison's reputation as a hostess rather than to any documented recipe of hers. Nearly everything here is a variation on the pound-cake formula of equal weights of butter, sugar, flour and eggs, which is why the instructions are all beating and no leavening apart from the two saleratus cakes; whisked eggs did the lifting. The Black Cake at the centre is the great transatlantic fruitcake, four pounds of dried fruit and a pound of citron, with Madeira and brandy beaten into the batter after the eggs and flour, and it belongs to the same family as the British Christmas cake and the Caribbean black cake still made today. The bitter almonds in the macaroons and ratafias were the standard source of almond flavour before benzaldehyde extract was available, which is why they turn up so casually in books of this date.