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Sandwiches, Victoria
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-4 eggs; their weight in pounded sugar, butter and flour ; saltspoonful of salt, a layer of any kind of jam or marmalade. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 3d.
Beat the butter to a cream; dredge in the flour and pounded sugar; stir these ingredients well together and add the eggs, which should be previously thoroughly whisked. When the mixture has been well-beaten for about 10 minutes, butter a Yorkshire-pudding tin, pour in the batter, and bake it in a moderate oven for 20 minutes. Let it cool, spread one half of the cake with a layer of nice preserve, place over it the other half of the cake, press the pieces slightly together, and then cut it into long finger-pieces; pile them in crossbars on a glass dish, and serve.
TIME.-20 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
SAUCES, REMARKS UPON.
A plain butter cake baked thin, jammed and cut into fingers — the ancestor of the round two-layer Victoria sponge. The whole method rests on aeration by beating, since there is no raising agent.
- Weighing by eggFour medium eggs in shell weigh roughly 8 oz, so take about 8 oz (225 g) each of butter, sugar and flour. Weigh your own eggs and match them rather than trusting the round number.
- Pounded sugarThis is sugar crushed fine in a mortar, the equivalent of caster or superfine sugar. Granulated will work but dissolves less readily into the butter and gives a coarser crumb.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). At 20 minutes a cake this thin is done; test at 16 or 17 minutes, as the edges dry quickly in a shallow tin.
- The tinA Yorkshire-pudding tin here means a shallow rectangular baking tin, not a muffin pan for individual puddings. Something near 9 x 13 inches gives a layer around half an inch thick; butter it and line the base if you want a clean turn-out.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon.
- The hinge: beatingThere is no baking powder in this formula, so all the lift comes from air worked into the butter and from the whisked eggs. Cream the butter until pale, whisk the eggs thoroughly before they go in, and take the full 10 minutes of beating seriously — undermixed, the cake bakes flat and close.
- Adding the eggsThe order given (flour and sugar into the butter, then eggs) is unusual and prone to curdling. Beat the eggs in gradually and, if the batter looks split, add a spoonful of the measured flour to bring it back.
- AssemblingCool completely before cutting the sheet in two and spreading the jam; a warm cake tears and the preserve runs. Firm jams and marmalade hold the fingers together better than a loose conserve.
- YieldAs stated, enough for 6 as a tea cake — roughly 18 to 24 fingers depending on how narrowly you cut them. They keep a day in a tin but are best the day they are made.
The Victoria sandwich is named for Queen Victoria and is generally traced to the fashion for afternoon tea that grew through her reign; the "sandwich" is the jam between two layers, and in the earlier form here the cake is baked as one thin sheet, split, filled and cut into fingers to be eaten from the hand rather than with a fork. The equal-weights formula — eggs weighed against their own weight in butter, sugar and flour — is the same arithmetic as pound cake, and it needed no measuring cups, only a balance and the eggs themselves. Beeton's household books circulated in many revised editions long after her death in 1865, and this entry sits among the alphabetical reference matter of a later compilation, priced at 1s. 3d. in the per-dish costing convention of the book.