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Almond Cake
(Bocca di dama) Granulated sugar, nine ounces, Very fine Hungarian flour, five ounces, Sweet almonds with some bitter ones, two ounces, Six whole eggs and three egg yolks, Taste of lemon peel.
After skinning the almonds in warm water and drying them well, grind or better pound them well together with a tablespoonful of sugar and mix well with the flour. Put the rest of the sugar in a deep dish with the egg yolks and the grated lemon peel (just a taste) and stir with a ladle for a quarter of an hour. In another dish beat the six whites of egg and when they have become quite thick mix them with other ingredients stirring slowly everything together. To bake place the mixture in a baking-tin greased evenly with butter and sprinkled with powdered sugar and flour. 190
This is a whisked almond sponge in the Artusi manner, but as written it includes bitter almonds in an unmeasured proportion, and that is why it cannot be recommended today.
- The bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and moistened — exactly what happens when they are pounded with sugar here. Their sale for eating is prohibited in the United States and restricted elsewhere; they were once used domestically in small quantities for flavour, but the dose is not something a home cook can judge.
- Why the quantity makes it worseThe recipe asks for two ounces of "sweet almonds with some bitter ones" and never says how many bitter ones. A handful in a cake this size is a very different matter from one or two, and the original leaves it entirely to the cook. A current almond cake recipe should be used instead.
- No oven is specifiedThe instructions stop at the greased tin. Period Italian sponge cakes of this type were baked in a moderate oven, but this text gives neither heat nor time, and nothing here tells the baker when the cake is done.
- Hungarian flour"Very fine Hungarian flour" was the finely milled white flour of the Austro-Hungarian mills, made from harder wheat and widely called for in period pastry recipes. It has no exact modern counterpart; a fine plain flour is the nearest idea.
- The quarter-hour of stirringBeating the yolks with sugar for fifteen minutes by hand is not padding — it is the whole leavening. There is no chemical raising agent, so the aeration in the yolks and the separately whipped whites is all that lifts the cake.
- Skinning the almondsWarm water loosens the skins so they slip off between finger and thumb; drying them thoroughly afterwards matters, since damp almonds turn to paste rather than powder when pounded.
Bocca di dama — "lady's mouth" — is one of the standing names in Italian domestic pastry for a light almond sponge, the sort of cake meant to seem delicate enough for a refined appetite. Versions of it appear in Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (1891), the book that did more than any other to fix a shared repertoire of Italian home cooking, and this recipe belongs to the same tradition, though its quantities are not Artusi's; The Italian Cook Book, compiled for English-speaking readers after the First World War, drew on that tradition for much of its sweets chapter. The cake belongs to a broad family of egg-raised sponges — Spanish bizcocho, Portuguese pão de ló, Italian pan di Spagna — that predate chemical leavening entirely and depend on long hand-beating. The addition of a few bitter almonds for perfume was common across nineteenth-century European baking, and its disappearance from modern recipes, replaced by almond extract, is a good marker of how much twentieth-century food regulation changed the ordinary pantry.