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Rice Cake (II)
Mrs. Arthurs.
Break six eggs on half a pound of rice flour and half a pound of crushed white and sifted sugar, then beat all together for fifteen minutes, and flavour with a few drops of essence of lemon; line a dish with buttered paper and bake half an hour.
A whole-egg rice flour sponge with no leavening and no fat in the batter: the fifteen minutes of beating is the entire raising method. Everything else follows from that.
- The hinge is the beatingFifteen minutes of hand-beating builds the only aeration in the cake. Note that the original breaks the eggs onto the flour and sugar and beats everything together. If you instead whisk eggs and sugar to a ribbon in a stand mixer (8 to 10 minutes on high, until the mixture falls from the whisk and sits on the surface for several seconds) you will need to fold the rice flour in by hand in three additions, which is a departure from the text.
- Weights, not cupsHalf a pound of rice flour is 8 oz / 225 g; half a pound of sugar is 8 oz / 225 g, a little over one cup. Rice flour cup weights vary widely by grind and brand, so 225 g may measure anywhere from about 1 1/3 to 1 3/4 cups -- weigh it if you can.
- Crushed and sifted sugarThat is caster (superfine) sugar, ground down from loaf sugar and passed through a sieve. Ordinary granulated will work but dissolves less readily in the eggs; superfine is closer to the original.
- Rice flourUse fine white rice flour, not glutinous (sweet) rice flour, which behaves quite differently. Brown rice flour will make the crumb heavy and sandy.
- Essence of lemonLemon oil dissolved in alcohol, much stronger than modern lemon extract by volume in some period preparations. A few drops means a few drops; 1/2 teaspoon of modern extract, or the zest of one lemon, is a reasonable reading.
- Buttered paperLine the tin base and sides with parchment and butter it. A batter with no fat in it sticks fiercely, and a fatless sponge tears if you try to force it out.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as the cook was expected to judge her own range. A moderate oven for a sponge of this kind is 325 to 350F (165 to 175C); the lower end is safer, since rice flour colours quickly and the cake dries out if pushed.
- Time and donenessNo tin size is given, and six eggs with a pound of dry ingredients makes a large batter; in a deep or narrow tin half an hour will not be enough. Treat the half hour as a starting point, judge by a skewer coming out clean and the top springing back, and start checking at 25 minutes.
- Yield and servingYield depends on the tin, but this is a large cake. The close, slightly dry crumb takes well to butter, cream or preserves, and it stales fast: eat within a day or two.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" as a charitable fundraiser for the Hospital for Sick Children, and its recipes carry contributors' names — here Mrs. Arthurs — in the manner of the American community cookbooks it was modelled on. Rice flour cakes were a fixture of nineteenth-century tea tables on both sides of the Atlantic: rice flour was cheap, kept well, and gave a fine, close, slightly sandy crumb quite unlike wheat sponge, which is why it also turns up in period recipes for invalids and children. This cake is leavened entirely by beaten egg, and the fifteen-minute beat is the price of that.