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Augusta Cakes
Place in a copper basin four egg yolks with two ounces sugar, half teaspoon vanilla essence and one ounce peeled and finely chopped almonds. Sharply stir with wooden spoon five minutes. Beat up the whites of the four eggs to a stiff froth and add to the yolks, gently mix with skimmer, add one ounce sifted flour, one ounce melted butter, and stir until well amalgamated. Divide the preparation in six individual tartlet moulds, then bake in oven fifteen minutes. Remove and let cool off. Place in a bowl two ounces sugar, half teaspoon vanilla essence and two ounces butter, set bowl on ice and sharply stir with wooden spoon six minutes. Evenly spread this butter over the cakes. Sprinkle a little sugar over and serve.
A small genoise-style sponge baked in tartlet moulds and finished with a hand-beaten vanilla butter. The whole thing depends on how gently the melted butter goes in at the end.
- The hinge: adding the butterMelted butter is heavy and will knock the air out of a whipped-egg batter within a few strokes. Fold the flour in first, then drizzle the butter down the side of the bowl and fold only until no streaks remain.
- Ounces are weights, not fluid ouncesTwo ounces sugar is about 1/4 cup plus a spoonful; one ounce flour is a scant 1/4 cup; one ounce butter is two tablespoons. A scale is easier than converting, and the ratios here are tight enough to reward one.
- Copper basin and skimmerUnlined copper helps egg whites hold; a clean stainless or glass bowl does the same job with a pinch of cream of tartar. The "skimmer" is a flat perforated spoon used as a folding tool, so a rubber spatula stands in.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none, assuming the cook knows what a sponge wants. Bake at 350F; fifteen minutes suits shallow tartlet moulds, and the cakes are done when the tops spring back.
- Vanilla essenceRead this as vanilla extract, half a teaspoon in the batter and half in the butter.
- Beating the yolksFive sharp minutes with a wooden spoon is hand work that a mixer would shorten considerably. Stop when the mixture is pale and falls in a ribbon.
- The butter over iceSetting the bowl on ice keeps the creamed butter firm enough to spread rather than slump. Start with butter at cool room temperature; ice-hard butter will not take the sugar.
- Yield and servingSix small cakes, each a couple of bites.
The International Cook Book came out of Alexander Filippini's long career in the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, and its short, numbered, French-trained formulas read like a professional's working notes rather than a domestic manual: a copper basin and a skimmer are assumed to be at hand. The cake itself is a separated sponge, or biscuit, with the whites beaten apart and folded into the yolks and melted butter added, baked in individual moulds and finished with a simple creamed butter rather than a cooked icing. Naming such small cakes after women, cities or patrons is often said to have been common in restaurants of the period, and no particular Augusta is documented here; the label most likely marks a house variation on a familiar base rather than any dish with a traceable origin.