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Saucer Cake (for Tea)
INGREDIENTS.1/4 lb. of flour, lb. of tous-les-mois, lb. of pounded white sugar, lb. of butter, 2 1/2 eggs, 1 oz. of candied orange or lemonpeel. AVERAGE COST, 10d. Mix the flour and tous-les-mois together; add the sugar, the candied peel cut into thin slices, the butter beaten to a cream, and the eggs well whisked. Beat the mixture for 10 minutes, put it into a buttered cake-tin or mould, or, if this is not obtainable, a soup-plate answers the purpose, lined with a piece of buttered paper. Bake the cake in a moderate oven from 1 to 11 hour, and when cold, put it away in a covered canister. It will remain good some weeks, even if it be cut into slices.
TIME.-1 to 14 hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
SAUERBRATEN. fork. When ready for cooking, lard the meat with lardoons, dipped in a mixture of ground cloves, pepper and salt; then having scattered a little salt over the meat, brown it a nice golden colour in a stewpan, with the butter and flour. Next pour in sideways enough water to cover the meat, put on the lid, and, after a few minutes, add the vegetables and the bread, and, weighting the lid down, let all simmer for 2 1/2 hours, adding the cream 1/2 hour before serving. Take out the meat and put it on a hot plate in the oven. Thicken the gravy with flour, pass through a sieve, bring it to a boil, pour a little over the meat, and send the rest to table in a tureen.
TIME. About 2 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A plain butter cake stiffened with a starch, baked flat in whatever shallow dish the household had — a soup plate at a pinch. The quantities as printed have lost their fractions, so treat the proportions below with care.
- Tous-les-moisA fine starch from the rhizome of Canna edulis, sold in Victorian grocers alongside arrowroot and no longer stocked under that name. Arrowroot or cornflour behaves the same way, lightening the crumb and drying it slightly so the cake keeps.
- Ambiguous weightsOnly the flour carries a figure here; the tous-les-mois, sugar and butter are given as bare pounds with their fractions missing, and any conversion would be a guess. The numbers cannot be recovered from this text.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F (175C), though the book itself gives no temperature. At that heat a shallow cake of this size may well be done nearer 40 to 50 minutes than the stated hour; a deeper tin will need the full time.
- The soup plateThe instruction is practical rather than quaint — a wide shallow vessel gives a thin cake that bakes through quickly and slices well. A 9-inch cake tin or a metal pie plate does the same job. Line it with buttered paper as directed, since the sugar-heavy batter sticks.
- Beating for ten minutesWith butter creamed separately and whisked eggs added, ten minutes of hand beating aerates the batter, which has no chemical raising agent at all. An electric mixer reaches the same point in three or four minutes; stop when the mixture is pale and holds a ribbon.
- Candied peelBuy whole candied peel and slice it thinly yourself if you can. The diced supermarket sort is drier and sharper, and 1 oz is a modest amount, so its quality shows.
- KeepingThe "covered canister" is an airtight tin. The starch and sugar do genuinely keep this cake edible for a week or two, though "some weeks" assumes a cool larder rather than a heated kitchen.
- YieldA single shallow cake, about eight to ten slices with tea.
Saucer cake belongs to the Victorian tea table, where a household wanted something sweet that could be cut into thin slices over several days without going stale — the starch and the storage tin are often read as answering to that requirement, though the connection is inference rather than evidence. Tous-les-mois, whose French name is generally translated as "all the months", reached British grocers from the West Indies in the nineteenth century as one of several tropical starches marketed as easily digestible foods for invalids and children, arrowroot being the best known. Its appearance in a plain tea cake may suggest that such colonial imports moved from the sickroom shelf into ordinary baking, and the alternative of a soup plate for a tin is a reminder that Beeton wrote for kitchens that were not fully equipped.