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Everlasting Cake
Beat together the yolks of six eggs and three-fourths of a pint white sugar, add one and a half pints blanched and shelled almonds, half pound sliced citron well floured, and the whipped whites with one and a half pints sifted flour; pour one and a half inches thick in well-greased dripping pans, bake in a quick oven, and, when done, cut slices one inch thick across the cake, turn each slice over on its side, return to oven and bake a short time. When cold place in a tin box. These will keep a year and a half or more, and are nice to have in store. - Mrs. J. S. Williams, Brooklyn.
This is a twice-baked keeping cake in the biscotti family: no butter, no leavening beyond whipped whites, and a second turn in the oven to drive off moisture. The second bake is the whole point, and it is the step most likely to be cut short.
- The hinge: dry the slices, don't brown themThe purpose of returning the cut slices to the oven is dehydration, not colour. Turn the oven down for this stage and give it long enough that a slice snaps rather than bends; anything left soft in the middle will mould in the tin regardless of how long the recipe promises it will keep.
- Volume measuresThree-fourths of a pint of sugar is 1 1/2 cups; a pint and a half of flour is about 3 cups, and the same volume of blanched almonds is roughly 3 cups, or about a pound. American pints here, not imperial.
- A quick ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 400-425F for the first bake. That is hot for a batter this thick, so watch the edges; the lower end of the range is safer if you want the centre set before the outside darkens.
- Dripping panA dripping pan is a shallow rectangular roasting pan. Any rimmed sheet pan works, provided the batter sits an inch and a half deep rather than spread thin.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in tubs at holiday season. Flouring it, as directed, keeps it from sinking. Candied lemon peel is the nearest substitute if citron is unavailable.
- Blanched and shelledRead this as shelled and blanched: almonds with the skins slipped off after a soak in hot water. The recipe does not say whether to chop them, and whole almonds in a slice this thick make cutting difficult; halved or coarsely chopped is easier to slice cleanly.
- FoldingThe whipped whites and the flour go in together, which means folding rather than beating. Overworked, the batter deflates and the cake bakes dense, since there is no chemical leavening to rescue it.
- SlicingCut while the cake is still warm but no longer hot. Cold, it crumbles; hot, it tears. A long serrated knife and a sawing stroke.
- Yield and keepingThey keep for months in an airtight tin if fully dried, though the eighteen months claimed is optimistic before the nuts turn rancid.
Twice-baked keeping cakes are old and widespread: the Italian biscotti, the German Zwieback, the Jewish mandelbrot and the ship's rusk all rest on the same principle, that a sweet dough baked once, sliced, and baked again until dry will outlast anything soft. In a nineteenth-century household without reliable cold storage, that mattered more than texture, and cakes that could be sealed in a tin and drawn on for unexpected visitors earned names like this one. The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of compiled community cookbooks that grew out of the Buckeye publishing tradition of the 1870s and 1880s, in which recipes were gathered from contributors and printed over the contributor's name and town: hence a Brooklyn correspondent in a book with a Southern title. The almonds and citron mark it as a special-occasion recipe rather than a plain one, and the absence of butter may well be design rather than thrift, since fat is what turns rancid in a cake meant to sit in store.