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Sweets and Cakes: Maraschino
No. 216. Cremona Cake Ingredients: Ground rice, one ground maize, sugar, orange, eggs, salt, cream, Maraschino, almonds, preserved cherries.
G Weigh three eggs, and take equal quantities of castor sugar, butter, ground rice and maize (the last two together); make a light paste with them, but only use one whole egg and the yolks of the two others, add the scraped peel of an orange and a pinch of salt. Roll this paste out to the thickness of a five-shilling piece, colour it with the yolk of an egg and bake it in a cake tin in a hot oven until it is a good colour, then take it out and cut it into four equal circular pieces. Have ready some well - whipped cream and flavour it with Maraschino, put a thick layer of this on one of the rounds of pastry, then cover it with the next round, on which also put a layer of cream, and so on until you come to the last round, which forms the top of the cake. Then split some almonds and colour them in the oven, cover the top of the cake with icing sugar flavoured with orange, and decorate the top with the almonds and preserved cherries.
No. 217. Cake alla Tolentina Ingredients: Sponge-cake, jam, brandy or Maraschino, cream, pine-apple.
Make a medium - sized sponge-cake; when cold cut off the top and scoop out all the middle and leave only the brown case; cover the outside with a good coating of jam or red currant jelly, and decorate it with some of the white of the cake cut into fancy shapes. Soak the rest of the crumb in brandy or Maraschino and mix it with quarter of a pint of whipped cream and bits of pine-apple cut into small dice; fill the cake with this; pile it up high in the centre and decorate the top with the brown top cut into fancy shapes.
No. 218. Riso all' Imperatrice Ingredients: Rice, sugar, milk, ice, preserved fruits, blanc - mange, Maraschino, cream.
Boil two dessert-spoonsful of rice and one of sugar in milk. When sufficiently boiled, drain the rice and let it get cold. In the meantime place a mould on ice, and decorate it with slices of preserved fruit, and fix them to the mould with just enough nearly cold dissolved isinglass to keep them in place. Also put half a pint of blancmange on the ice, and stir it till it is the right consistency, gradually add the boiled rice, half a glass of Maraschino, some bits of pine-apple cut in dice, and last of all half a pint of whipped cream. Fill the mould with this, and when it is sufficiently cold, turn it out and serve with a garnish of glacé fruits or a few brandy cherries.
No. 219. Amaretti leggieri (Almond Cakes) Ingredients: Almonds (sweet and bitter), eggs, castor sugar.
Blanch equal quantities of sweet and bitter almonds, and dry them a little in the oven, then pound them in a mortar, and add nearly double their quantity of castor sugar. Mix with the white of an egg well beaten up into a snow, and shape into little balls about the size of a pigeon's egg.
Put them on a piece of stout white paper, and bake them in a very slow oven. They should be very light and delicate in flavour.
No. 220. Cakes alla Livornese Ingredients: Almonds, eggs, sugar, salt, potato flour, butter.
Pound two ounces of almonds, and mix them with the yolks of two eggs and a spoonful of castor sugar flavoured with orange juice.
Then mix two ounces of sugar with an egg, and to this add the almonds, a pinch of salt, and gradually strew in one and a half ounces of potato flour. When it is all well mixed, add one ounce of melted butter, shape the cakes and bake them in a slow oven.
No. 221. Genoese Pastry Ingredients: Eggs, sugar, butter, flour, almonds, orange or lemon, brandy.
Weigh four eggs, and take equal weights of castor sugar, butter, and flour. Pound three ounces of almonds, and mix them with an egg, melt the butter, and mix all the ingredients with a wooden spoon in a pudding basin for ten minutes, then add a little scraped orange or lemon peel, and a dessert-spoonful of brandy. Spread out the paste in thin layers on a copper baking sheet, cover them with buttered paper, and bake in a moderately hot oven.
These cakes must be cut into shapes when they are hot, as otherwise they will break.
Six recipes grouped by their common flavouring, maraschino. Most translate directly, but No. 219 calls for bitter almonds in quantity and cannot be made as printed.
- No. 219 is the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are ground and wetted. Equal parts sweet and bitter almonds is far more bitter almond than any modern recipe permits, and while baking drives off some of the volatile cyanide it cannot be relied on to make the cakes safe. Unprocessed bitter almonds are not sold for eating in the US and are effectively unavailable at retail in the UK; use a current amaretti recipe built on sweet almonds with a measured almond extract.
- Weighing by egg"Weigh three eggs, and take equal quantities" means put the eggs, in shell, on the scale and match that weight in each of sugar, butter and the rice-and-maize mixture. Three large eggs run about 6 oz / 170 g, four about 8 oz / 225 g for the Genoese.
- Oven numbersOn the usual modern equivalents a hot oven is about 425-450F (220-230C), moderately hot about 375-400F (190-200C), a slow oven about 300F (150C); the book also asks for a 'very slow' oven for the amaretti, lower again. All of these are approximations. The Livornese cakes and the Genoese sheets are thin and want the shorter end of any timing you set.
- A five-shilling pieceThe old crown was roughly 3 mm thick, so about 1/8 inch. The instruction is approximate at best; roll to a scant 1/8 inch and expect the round to be firm rather than tender, since it has to carry cream without collapsing.
- Ground maize and potato flourGround maize here is fine cornmeal or polenta ground to flour, not cornflour/cornstarch. Potato flour in this period means potato starch, sold now as such; it is not the same as modern dehydrated potato flour and substituting cornstarch works better than substituting wheat flour.
- Isinglass and blancmangeIsinglass was a fish-derived setting agent; powdered gelatine does the same work, bloomed and cooled to just short of setting before you paint fruit onto the chilled mould. "Blanc-mange" in No. 218 means a sweetened milk-and-starch or gelatine cream, not the modern packet dessert; half a pint is 10 fl oz / 285 ml in imperial measure.
- MaraschinoA clear, dry cherry liqueur distilled from marasca cherries and their stones, still made by Luxardo and others. It is not the syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries; that will make the cream sickly. 'Half a glass' in No. 218 is imprecise -- a period liqueur glass held only an ounce or two, so read it as 1-2 tablespoons.
- YieldsNone are given. On a rough estimate the Cremona cake, cut into four rounds and layered, would serve around eight, and the Riso all'Imperatrice would fill a mould of about a quart. The Genoese sheet gives a couple of dozen small cut shapes, and the cutting must be done while the sheet is still warm, as stated.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) is Mrs W. G. Waters's collection of Italian household cookery, framed after Boccaccio: ten diners in a country house exchanging dishes over ten days. The thread through this group is maraschino, the dry cherry liqueur long associated with Zara in Dalmatia, then under Austrian rule and now Zadar in Croatia; it was one of the standard confectioner's flavourings of nineteenth-century Europe and turns up in creams, ices and trifles far more often than in a glass. Riso all'Imperatrice is the Italian form of the French riz à l'impératrice, a moulded rice-and-cream sweet generally traced to the Second Empire kitchens and named for the Empress Eugénie, and its appearance beside cakes named for Cremona, Tolentino and Livorno shows how thoroughly the French repertoire had settled into Italian pastry work by the time Waters was writing. The amaretti recipe calls for equal parts bitter and sweet almonds; bitter almond flavouring is still used in Italian amaretti today, within legal limits.