Almond Cakes
1/2 cup butter. 3/4 cup sugar. 1/3 cup milk. 2 eggs 1⅓ cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup Jordan almonds, blanched and cut in pieces Mix ingredients in order given, and bake in individual
This entry has come down to us incomplete — the ingredient column has been cut short at both ends, and the instruction breaks off mid-sentence. What survives is enough to identify the cake but not to bake it without judgement.
- The list is missing its foundationAs printed there is no fat, no sugar and no liquid, which a cake of this type would normally require. Comparable small-cake recipes of the period run to something in the region of 1/3 cup butter, 1 cup sugar and 1/3 cup milk for 1½ cups flour; treat any reconstruction as your own, not hers.
- Jordan almonds are not the candyIn 1896 a Jordan almond was the large, flat, sweet almond associated with Malaga in Spain (the name is usually traced to the Old French jardin, 'garden', rather than to the river, though the derivation is not certain), sold shelled and unroasted. Use whole raw almonds, not the sugar-shelled confection now sold under that name.
- BlanchingPour boiling water over the almonds, let them stand a minute or two, then slip the skins off between finger and thumb. Dry them well before cutting or they will make the batter wet and sink to the bottom.
- "Mix ingredients in order given"The phrase directs the cook to combine the listed items in the printed sequence. Since the fat, sugar and liquid are missing from this fragment, any working method has to be inferred: most likely cream the fat, beat in the sugar, then the eggs, then flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk, and the almonds last.
- "Individual" tinsThe sentence ends there, but the period vessel is a gem or patty pan — roughly the modern muffin tin. Fill two-thirds full; the yield cannot be judged from so incomplete a list, but a batter built on 1½ cups flour would give somewhere around a dozen small cakes.
- OvenThe text breaks off before any oven direction survives. For a cake of this size, a moderate oven of about 350-375F for 20-25 minutes, until a straw or skewer comes out clean, is a reasonable modern setting. Nut-heavy batters brown on top before the centre is set, so test rather than going by colour.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to 1½ cups flour works out at about 1⅓ teaspoons per cup, at the generous end of ordinary proportions then and now. With modern double-acting powder you may find it rises fast.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) devotes many pages to small cakes baked in individual tins, a form that suited the new pressed-tin gem pans then cheap and widely sold. Fannie Farmer's method of tersely listing ingredients in a column and then writing "mix in order given" was part of the standardisation she is remembered for, which is why a fragment like this one reads as bare as it does.