Madeira Cake
for large cake.—3/4 lb. of butter, INGREDIENTS for large cake. lb. of butter, 1½ lb. of flour, lb. of castor sugar, rind of 1 lemon, 6 eggs, 2 oz. of candied peel. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 3d.
Beat the butter to a cream and dredge in the flour, then the sugar and grated lemonrind, lastly the eggs, well whisked. Beat the mixture well and put into a buttered tin; garnish the top with the peel cut in thin slices and bake in a hot oven from 1½ to 2 hours.
TIME.-1 to 2 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Maigre Maître d'Hôtel Sauce (Hot; made without Meat). - INGREDIENTS. - pint of melted butter, 1 heaped tablespoonful of chopped parsley, salt and pepper to taste, the juice of 1/2 large lemon ; when liked, 2 minced shalots. AVERAGE COST, 4d.
Make 1/2 pint of melted butter, stir in the above ingredients and let them just boil; when it is ready to serve.
TIME.-1 minute to simmer.
Maigre Soup (i.e., Soup without
A plain butter cake of the pound-cake family, scaled here for a large tin. Two of the weights have not survived intact in the printed text, so treat the ingredient list as a guide to proportion rather than a set of exact figures.
- Missing weightsThe butter and the castor sugar are both given as "lb." with no number, so the quantities cannot be recovered from this text. Cakes of this type are commonly made with butter and sugar at or near equal weight, but the actual proportion intended here is guesswork; check the proportions against a current Madeira cake recipe before mixing.
- "Hot oven"A Victorian "hot" oven is generally read as somewhere around 400F or above, though such ovens were not calibrated and the figure is only an approximation; either way it is too fierce for a cake of this size baked for an hour and a half. Bake a large plain cake at 325-350F; the crust will otherwise set and colour long before the centre is done.
- TimeThe two statements in the original disagree (1½ to 2 hours in the method, 1 to 2 in the note). At 325-350F a deep 8-9 inch cake will take about 1½ hours; test with a skewer to the centre.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar, finer than granulated but not powdered. Granulated will work if you cream it thoroughly, but the crumb is coarser.
- Order of mixingDredging the flour into the creamed butter before the sugar is the older method and produces a close, slightly heavy crumb. Modern practice creams butter with sugar first, beats in the eggs, then folds in the flour; that gives a lighter cake from the same ingredients.
- No raising agentAll the lift comes from air beaten into the butter and from the six well-whisked eggs, so the beating is the hinge of the recipe. Add the eggs gradually and stop as soon as the flour is incorporated.
- The candied peelSliced peel laid on the surface at the start tends to sink or scorch. Scatter it on after the cake has been in the oven twenty minutes or so, once the top has begun to set.
- TinThe recipe specifies only "a buttered tin". Given the quantities, a deep round or square cake tin of about 8-9 inches is a reasonable choice. Butter it and line the base and sides with paper for a bake this long.
- YieldA cake of this size cuts into 12-16 slices and keeps well wrapped for several days.
Madeira cake is generally held to take its name not from any ingredient but from the wine it was offered with: a plain, close-textured lemon-flavoured butter cake, cut in slices and handed round with a glass of Madeira or sherry to morning callers. Fortified wines from Madeira were popular on the British table through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the cake was among the accompaniments served with them, which may be why it carries no spice, fruit or icing to compete with the drink. A strip or slices of candied citron or lemon peel across the top is often described as a mark of the cake, and by Mrs Beeton's day it was one of the recognised plain cakes of the English household repertoire, valued for keeping well and for using nothing more exotic than butter, eggs, sugar, flour and a lemon.