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Almond Cake
Stir two eggs with half a pound of white sugar till very light; half a pound of unpeeled split almonds, as much soda as will lie on the point of a knife, half a pound of flour; roll it out and then put into a flat tin; brush it over with the yolk of an egg; bake till a light brown; then cut into long slices; set them on edge and roast them,
This is a twice-baked almond biscuit in the biscotti family, written for a cook who already knew the method. The second bake is the whole point of the recipe, and the original barely mentions it.
- The hinge: the second bake"Set them on edge and roast them" means returning the cut slices to the oven, standing upright on the tray, until dry through. The recipe names no temperature or time; a low oven, somewhere around 300F for 15-25 minutes, is a reasonable modern reading. Without this drying stage the result stays soft and will not keep like a dry biscuit.
- Weights in cupsHalf a pound of white sugar is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons; half a pound of flour is about 1 3/4 to 2 cups depending on how it is scooped; half a pound of almonds is roughly 1 1/2 cups. Weighing is easier here, since the dough is stiff and small errors show.
- "As much soda as will lie on the point of a knife"Read this as a scant 1/8 teaspoon of baking soda. There is no acid in the dough, so it is doing very little beyond a faint lift and a slight browning; it is not a leavening system and more will taste soapy.
- Unpeeled split almondsSkin-on almonds halved lengthwise along their natural seam. Whole skin-on almonds work and give a coarser cut face; blanched slivered almonds are not the same thing, as the skins are part of the colour and flavour here.
- Stirring the eggs and sugar"Till very light" means beating two eggs with the sugar until pale and thickened — several minutes with a mixer. This is the main aeration the dough gets.
- Oven for the first bakeThe recipe gives no oven term at all, only "a light brown" as the doneness cue; 350F for roughly 25-30 minutes suits a slab around 3/4 inch thick. The egg-yolk wash will darken faster than the crumb sets, so judge by firmness at the centre.
- ShapingThe dough is closer to a firm shortbread than a batter. Press or roll it into a rectangle on a lined flat tin rather than expecting it to pour, and cut the slices while the slab is still warm — cold, it shatters.
- Yield and keepingExpect 24-30 finger-length slices. Fully dried, they keep several weeks in a tin.
Twice-baked almond biscuits of this shape — a flat slab baked, sliced, then dried again on edge — appear in nineteenth-century North American cookbooks under several names: almond cake, almond rusks, mandelbrot, Zwieback, and the Italian biscotti that is now the familiar term. The point of the second low bake was practical: driving out the moisture gave a biscuit that travelled and kept without refrigeration. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in 1877 from recipes contributed by local women and sold in aid of charity, is full of this kind of terse, assumed-knowledge writing — the contributor gave no oven temperature, which she would in any case have judged by hand, and no explanation of the second baking.