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Four Quarters
Weigh four very fresh eggs and put them in an earthenware dish. Add successively, sieved flour, fine sugar, and fresh butter, each one of these items being of the same weight of the eggs--hence the name: Four Quarters. With a wooden spoon, work these four ingredients, then let them rest for five minutes. Turn it all into a buttered mold and let it cook for five quarters of an hour in a gentle oven or in a double saucepan. Turn it out, and eat it either cold or hot and with fruit.
This is the French quatre-quarts — pound cake by another name, built entirely on the weight of the eggs. The scale does the measuring, so work in grams and the recipe scales to whatever eggs you have.
- Weigh first, then matchFour large eggs in the shell come to roughly 220-240 g; four eggs out of the shell, about 200-220 g. Weigh whichever way you like, but weigh the flour, sugar and butter to that same figure. There is no other measurement in the recipe and no substitute for a scale.
- "Work these four ingredients"The original is terse to the point of unhelpfulness. Cream the softened butter with the sugar until pale, beat in the eggs one at a time, then fold in the sieved flour. Dumping all four together and stirring gives a dense, greasy crumb — this cake has no baking powder and depends entirely on air beaten into the butter and eggs.
- A gentle ovenAround 325F (160C). This is a rich, heavy batter in a deep mould, and anything hotter sets the crust before the centre is cooked.
- Five quarters of an hourSeventy-five minutes. That suits a 9x5-inch loaf tin or a deep 8-inch round; a shallower tin will be done in 50-60 minutes. Test with a skewer at the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- The double saucepanThe alternative given is a bain-marie: the mould set over simmering water, covered, as for a pudding. It produces a moist, pale, close-textured cake with no crust, and it would have been a practical option where a steady oven was not available. Keep the water at a bare simmer and topped up.
- The five-minute restWorth keeping. It lets the flour hydrate and the batter relax slightly, which makes it easier to level in the tin. Do not extend it much beyond that or the aeration begins to collapse.
- Buttered mouldButter and flour it, or line the base with parchment. Seventy-five minutes of sugar against hot metal will glue an unlined tin shut. Cool ten minutes before turning out, or the cake will break at the waist.
- Yield and servingAbout eight to ten slices. 'With fruit' probably means poached or stewed fruit and its syrup alongside — cherries, plums, apples — rather than fruit baked into the batter.
Quatre-quarts is the French name for the same arithmetic the English called pound cake: equal weights of eggs, butter, sugar and flour, a formula that needs only a balance and something to weigh against. It is most associated with Brittany, where it remains a regional staple, and appears to have been widely known as a plain household cake in northern France and Belgium, requiring no chemical raising agent and no great skill beyond patience with the creaming. The Belgian Cook Book was published in 1915 from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees in England, which may account for the compressed instructions and the assumption that the reader already knows what to do with a bowl of batter. The offered choice between a gentle oven and a double saucepan reflects kitchens in which a steady low oven was less dependable than a pot of simmering water.