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French Cakes
Five cups of flour, two cups of sugar, half a cup of butter, one cup of milk, one wineglass of wine, three eggs, spice to taste, one teaspoon of soda; rub the butter and sugar together, then add the milk; part of the flour, soda in the wine next; then the rest of the flour, and eggs beaten separately, the whites last; bake in square tins
A plain wine-flavoured cake from the era when soda was dissolved in whatever acidic liquid the recipe already contained. The proportions are lean by modern standards, so the handling matters more than usual.
- The hinge: soda in the wineDissolving the teaspoon of soda in the wineglass of wine and adding it mid-mix is the chemical leavening here, the wine's mild acidity helping to set it off; the separately beaten whites, added last, do the rest. Mix and get the pans into the oven promptly, since the reaction is largely spent within minutes and there is no baking powder to carry it.
- A wineglassIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is about 2 fluid ounces, or 1/4 cup. Use a sherry, Madeira or other fortified wine; a dry table wine gives less flavour and less sugar.
- No oven temperature givenBake at 350F. Shallow square tins will be done in roughly 25 to 35 minutes; a thicker layer in one pan will need 40 minutes or more.
- "Square tins"The recipe names square tins and nothing more. Two 8-inch square pans, greased and floured or lined, will take the batch, though it makes a deep layer; a quarter-sheet pan also works and gives a thinner, more cookie-like square.
- Five cups of flour is not a typoThis is a stiff, close-grained batter, closer to a rolled tea cake than a modern layer cake, and the small amount of butter means it will read as dry if overbaked. Pull it as soon as a tester comes out clean.
- Rubbing butter and sugarHalf a cup of butter will not cream light with two cups of sugar. Work it to a sandy paste, then bring it together with the milk as directed rather than fighting for volume.
- Spice to tasteNutmeg, mace and cinnamon are the period defaults for a wine cake — start with a teaspoon of nutmeg or a half teaspoon each of nutmeg and mace for this quantity of flour.
- YieldRoughly 3 1/2 pounds of batter, giving a generous number of small squares depending on the depth of the pan.
"French cakes" in nineteenth-century North American cookbooks are often said to have had little to do with France; the label is usually read as a general mark of refinement attached to small, spiced, wine-scented cakes cut into neat shapes for tea trays. What is worth noticing here is the chemistry: the soda goes into the wine, not the milk, because a cook had to pair her alkali with an acid already in the recipe — cream of tartar, or, in a company cake like this one, the sherry or Madeira kept in the sideboard. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by hundreds of local women and sold to benefit the Hospital for Sick Children, which may account for the telegraphic style of working notes passed between cooks.