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Wine Cake
Put six tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar into a saucepan with one pint of wine, and stir it over the fire till on the point of boiling. Take the sweetened wine off the fire and leave it till cooled to blood heat. Beat six eggs well, and mix them with the wine, then stir the liquor gradually into four ounces of the best white flour, and beat it well. Butter a cake-tin, pour in the cake, and bake it in a quick oven. Remove the cake from the tin as soon as baked.
A very lean batter — no butter, no leavening, and more liquid than flour — so this behaves more like a baked wine custard than a modern cake. Almost everything depends on the temperature of the wine when the eggs go in.
- Blood heat is literalCool the sweetened wine to about 98-100F, warm but not hot to a fingertip. If it is appreciably hotter, the beaten eggs risk scrambling when they go in.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term means finely ground granulated sugar - modern superfine or caster sugar. Confectioners' sugar cut with cornstarch may cloud or thicken the wine.
- A pint of wineTwo US cups. The recipe does not specify a type; a sweet fortified wine such as Madeira, sherry or Marsala stands up to the sugar, while a dry table wine will leave the cake sharp and thin-tasting.
- Four ounces of flourAbout 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons by measure — weigh it if you can, since the flour-to-liquid ratio is the whole structure here. The batter will be pourable and loose, which is correct.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. The heat sets the egg quickly and drives the puff, since there is no chemical leavening at all.
- Pan and timingNo time is given. An 8- or 9-inch buttered tin will take roughly 25–35 minutes, until well risen, browned and just set in the center. It will sink somewhat as it cools, as any egg-leavened batter does.
- Turn it out at onceThe instruction to remove the cake as soon as it is baked matters: a sugary batter of this kind will stick to the tin as it cools.
- Alcohol and yieldThe wine is only brought to the point of boiling rather than reduced, though further alcohol will be lost in the oven. Probably serves six to eight, best warm, with cream.
Wine cakes of this kind belong to an older English and Continental line of egg-raised batters - closer to the baked wine posset and the sack-and-egg puddings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than to the butter cakes that dominate American cookbooks by 1900. Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) draws heavily on the working repertoire of a great hotel kitchen, and it includes a number of these plain, egg-leavened sweets at a time when baking powder was becoming standard in home baking.