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German Almond Cake
1/2 pound of almonds 1/2 pound sugar Whites of 10 eggs 1 teacup of milk 2 ounces butter Grated rind of 1 lemon 4 ounces of flour Blanch the almonds, and put them through the nut mill; then pound them well in a mortar, a little at a time, adding a drop of water occasionally to prevent oiling. Make the milk hot enough to melt the butter. Mix the sugar, flour and lemon rind very carefully, and then add the milk, a little at a time, and mix until perfectly smooth. Now add the almond paste to the flour, etc., and mix all well together. Then beat the whites of eggs to a stiff froth, and mix them in also. When all ingredients have been carefully mixed, spread the mixture about an inch thick on a well buttered and floured baking tin. Bake in a moderate oven from twenty minutes to half an hour.
A flourless-in-spirit sheet cake leavened entirely by egg white, from the era when a cook's arm was the mixer. The whole thing hinges on how the almonds and the whites are handled.
- Almonds without oilingThe point of the mortar and the drop of water is to keep the almonds from turning to butter. A food processor does this in seconds, pulsed, with a tablespoon of the recipe's sugar added to absorb oil; run it continuously and you get almond butter and a greasy cake. Store-bought almond flour works and is generally finer than mill-ground almonds.
- BlanchingHalf a pound of whole almonds, covered with boiling water for a minute, then slipped out of their skins between finger and thumb. Skins left on give a speckled, coarser crumb rather than the pale cake intended.
- Teacup of milkRead it as about 1/2 to 3/4 cup. Period teacups were an elastic measure, commonly reckoned at somewhere between four and six fluid ounces, so the figure is approximate by nature; the batter should be a thick, spreadable paste, not pourable.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F (moderate is generally reckoned 350-375F). At an inch thick, twenty minutes to half an hour is realistic.
Almond cakes leavened by egg white rather than yeast or chemical raising agents belong to a long Central European tradition, the torte family of German and Austrian baking, where ground nuts stand in for much of the flour and beaten whites do the lifting. That this one carries only four ounces of flour against half a pound each of almonds and sugar puts it closer to a torte than to a cake in the English sense. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century household books often grouped recipes by the ingredient a cook was left holding, and a kitchen that had just made custard, mayonnaise or a gold cake was left with whites and no refrigeration to hold them in. Such books are full of recipes whose purpose is to use up the other half of an egg.