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Finest Wine Cake
Make the snow cake mixture and leave out the milk. Instead of it mix in at the last nearly a small teacupful of madeira wine, with enough either of red strawberry syrup or of drops of carmine to make the cake couleur de rose, but only pale blush or peach bloom, not any dull red or purples for cake. The lemon juice is very necessary here; it changes red to bright pink.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the book's snow cake formula in front of you, and changes only the liquid and the color. Two things carry it — the wine goes in last, and the acid is what makes the pink read as pink.
- It depends on another recipeThe page assumes the book's snow cake formula, of which we are told only that milk is the liquid and that it contains lemon juice. You need that base recipe; this page is only the substitution. A white or silver cake batter of similar proportions should behave much the same way.
- "Nearly a small teacupful"A period teacup is usually reckoned at around 6 fl oz, though the measure was never standardised and a 'small' one would be less; read this as roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup of Madeira in place of the milk. Since the milk quantity is not given here, match the wine to whatever milk the base recipe calls for.
- Add the wine last, and gentlyAdd the wine last -- The recipe is explicit that the wine goes in at the last. Wine is acidic and will thin and slacken a creamed batter, so mix it in gently and stop as soon as the colour is even.
- The lemon juice is the hingeCarmine and strawberry syrup are pH-sensitive. In a batter that leans alkaline, red pigment drifts toward blue-violet or a muddy brick; the acid pulls it back to clear pink. The lemon juice comes from the snow cake base, and this is the one instruction not to skip.
- ColoringCarmine (cochineal extract) is still sold as a liquid food color and is not vegetarian; a drop or two of modern red gel does the same job. The target -- pale blush, not dull red -- is worth respecting.
- Strawberry syrupPeriod strawberry syrup was a thick sweetened fruit syrup, closer to a snow-cone syrup than to a preserve. If you use it for color, count it as part of the liquid and reduce the wine accordingly, or the batter will run.
- Oven and panNo oven or pan is specified here; bake as the snow cake recipe directs. If the Madeira you use is a sweet style, its residual sugar may brown the edges a little faster than a milk cake, so check them early.
- Flavor after bakingSome of the alcohol cooks off, though less than is often supposed, and the Madeira's raisin-and-nut character stays and grows more pronounced after a day, wrapped.
Wine cake belongs to a large nineteenth-century family of pale, fine-crumbed butter cakes flavored with a fortified wine rather than with spice — sherry, port and Madeira all appear in American cookbooks of the period, Madeira keeping indefinitely in a warm pantry and a staple of American cellars from the colonial trade onward. The English Madeira cake is traditionally said to take its name from the wine served alongside it rather than from any wine in the batter; here, in an American professional pastry manual, the wine is actually mixed in. The color instruction is the mark of the trade: Whitehead wrote for bakeshop and hotel confectioners who tinted cakes to order, and couleur de rose — blush, peach bloom — was the fashionable tone, with purples and brick reds considered a botch. His note that lemon juice turns red to bright pink is a working baker's grasp of acid-base chemistry arrived at by observation, decades before anyone in a kitchen was talking about pH.