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Prussian Cakes
Two ounces sifted flour, three ounces fine sugar, three eggs, the juice of half a lemon, one ounce peeled and finely hashed sweet almonds. Place all ingredients except the flour in a basin and briskly whisk up for six minutes, then add the flour and mix well with a skimmer for half a minute. Transfer the batter into a lightly buttered pastry pan. Set in the oven to bake for fifteen minutes. Remove, divide into six equal pieces and serve.
This is a whisked sponge batter in the genoise family — no baking powder, no butter in the batter, and all of its lift coming from six minutes of hard beating. The eggs are the leavening, so everything else is secondary.
- The hinge: beat the eggs to the ribbon stageSix minutes of brisk whisking with the sugar should take the eggs pale, thick and well risen in volume, holding a trail from the whisk for a second or two. Undershoot it and the cake bakes flat and dense, because nothing else in the list can raise it.
- Weights to volumeTwo ounces of flour is a scant 1/2 cup, three ounces of sugar a scant 1/2 cup, one ounce of almonds about 3 tablespoons once chopped. This is a small cake by design; weigh if you can, as a heaping cup of flour will wreck the ratio.
- "Fine sugar"Caster or superfine sugar, which dissolves in the eggs during whisking. Ordinary granulated works but needs the full beating time; confectioners' sugar does not, as the cornstarch in it dulls the foam.
- Skimmer means foldThe skimmer is here doing the work of a folding tool. Add the flour in two or three additions and cut and fold with a spatula — half a minute is about right, and any longer deflates what you just built.
- Oven heatThe original assumes the cook knows; treat it as a moderate oven, 350F. Fifteen minutes suits a thin layer in a shallow tin, and the cake is done when the top springs back and the edges just pull from the sides.
- "Pastry pan"Read it as a shallow baking tin rather than a deep cake pan. A batter depth of about half an inch — roughly an 8-inch square — should let it bake through in the stated time and cut into six pieces.
- Almonds"Sweet" almonds simply distinguishes them from bitter almonds, which were still sold for flavouring. Blanched almonds chopped fine, not ground to meal, give the intended slight crunch.
- YieldSix small squares, best eaten the day they are made. Like all fatless sponges they stale fast and are much improved by a spoonful of whipped cream or fruit.
Nineteenth-century professional cookbooks used national labels loosely, and "Prussian cakes" belongs to a large family of egg-foam batters that circulated under interchangeable names — Savoy biscuit, Spanish cake, biscuit de Savoie, genoise — distinguished more by the shape of the tin and the addition of nuts or citrus than by any national tradition. What ties them together is technique rather than place: the discovery that whole eggs beaten long enough with sugar will carry flour and hold air through baking, which gave kitchens a cake needing neither yeast nor chemical leavening. That mattered in the era before reliable baking powder, and the method survived into the twentieth century because it produces a light, dry crumb that takes syrup, cream and liqueur well. Such national labelling reflects the period's appetite for arranging the dessert repertoire by country, whether or not the dish had much claim to the flag it flew.