Venice Roll
Roll up a sheet of cake spread with jelly or jam and ice it over with pink glaze or water icing, made by wetting the icing sugar with red currant or cherry juice, or wine and coloring. Ornament the top and sides with a pattern in white egg-icing.
This is a finishing recipe rather than a full one: Whitehead assumes you already have a sheet of sponge from earlier in the book and only tells you how to dress it. The whole thing hinges on rolling the cake while it is still warm and flexible.
- The sheet of cakeA thin sponge baked in a shallow sheet pan, thin enough to roll without cracking. A modern jelly-roll sponge recipe substitutes directly.
- Roll it warmTurn the sheet out onto sugared paper as soon as it leaves the oven, spread the jam while both are warm, and roll at once. A cooled sponge cracks along the outside of the curve, and no amount of icing hides that.
- Jelly or jamLoosen it first by warming and stirring, or beating in a spoonful of water. Cold set jam drags the crumb up off the sheet as you spread.
- Water icingConfectioners' sugar moistened to a thick pouring consistency with liquid — here currant or cherry juice, or wine with a drop of colouring. Reckon about 1 tablespoon of liquid to each cup of sugar, added a few drops at a time. It sets by drying, not by cooking, so it stays slightly soft.
- Egg-icingWhat we now call royal icing: egg white beaten with sifted confectioners' sugar until it holds a piped line. Roughly 2 cups sugar to one white. Let the pink glaze dry to the touch before piping the white pattern over it.
- Icing sugarPeriod "icing sugar" was finely ground sugar, not necessarily the starch-cut boxed confectioners' sugar sold now. Sift it regardless; lumps show badly in a thin glaze.
- YieldOne half-sheet roll gives 10 to 12 slices. Cut with a serrated knife, wiping between cuts, or the glaze shatters and the jam smears.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for working American cooks and hotel bakers in the 1880s and 90s, and his books read accordingly: short entries, no quantities where a professional would know them, and long lists of variations on a single base. "Venice roll" belongs to that last habit — the same jelly-roll sheet appears through the section under a number of names, each distinguished only by its filling and finish, in this case pink glaze with piped white decoration. The names of such rolls were probably commercial rather than geographic; Italian, Genoa and Venice cakes in Anglo-American baking of the period seem to have signalled a decorated confection meant to look continental in a shop window, with no documented link to the city named. The use of red currant or cherry juice as both flavour and colour is worth noting, sitting alongside the wine and coloring the recipe also offers.