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Plum Cake
A raised paste should be made with three ounces of butter, ten ounces of flour and two tablespoonfuls of sugar, three eggs, half an ounce of yeast and the requisite quantity of milk; when risen enough turn it out onto a well-floured board and roll it into a thin, square shape, put on a baking-sheet and place a rim of paste around the edge. Allow it to stand for about twenty minutes and brush the top over with butter, sprinkle in a few bitter almonds blanched and finely chopped and mixed with a quantity of cinnamon powdered. Cut the black plums in halves, removing the stones, and arrange on the paste with the skin side downward and putting them so as to overlap each other, then dust them over with caster-sugar and put the cake in a moderate oven to bake for twenty minutes or so. When done sprinkle over with more of the caster-sugar and allow it to become quite cold, when it should be cut up into squares of any desired size and shapes, placed on a dish, and served.
This is a German-style yeast-raised plum sheet cake, and everything about it is workable except one ingredient, which rules the recipe out as printed.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is chewed, crushed or wetted. The recipe calls for them blanched and finely chopped and scattered under the fruit; they do go into the oven with the cake, but chopping them and burying them under juicy fruit is not a reliable way to drive off the toxin.
- The quantity is unmeasured"A few bitter almonds" gives no way to reason about dose, and the amount reported as dangerous to a child is small — figures of roughly ten kernels are commonly cited, though the case literature is thin. An unweighed sprinkle across a sheet cake that is then cut into squares distributes an unknown amount unevenly.
- Not the same thing as almond extractCommercial almond flavouring, whether synthetic benzaldehyde or the natural kind derived from stone fruit kernels, is processed specifically to remove cyanogenic compounds. Whole bitter almonds are not sold for food in the United States and should not be treated as an interchangeable ingredient here.
- The rest is ordinary bakingThe paste is an enriched sweet yeast dough; "moderate oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350-375F; caster sugar is superfine sugar. None of that is the difficulty.
- If you want the cakeUse a current recipe for a yeasted plum cake or Zwetschgenkuchen rather than adapting this one.
The cake is a hotel-kitchen rendering of the German Pflaumenkuchen or Zwetschgenkuchen: a thin yeast-raised base with a raised rim, closely shingled halved plums, cinnamon sugar, cut into squares once cold. Bitter almonds were standard European pastry equipment well into the twentieth century, used sparingly for the marzipan note that sweet almonds cannot give, and period cookbooks call for them with no warning attached; they largely disappeared from Anglo-American kitchens over the following decades.