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Cake Madeleine
(Pasta Maddalena) Sugar, four and a half ounces, Flour, three ounces, Butter, one ounce, Egg-yolks, four, Whites of eggs, three, A pinch of bi-carbonate of soda, A taste of lemon peel.
First mix and stir the yolks with the sugar and when they have become whitish, add the flour and stir for fifteen minutes more. Mix with the butter, melting or softening it fine if it is hard and finally add the whites when they are well beaten.
The flour must be previously dried in the sun or on the fire.
This cake may be given different shapes, but keep it always thin and in little volume. It can be put in little molds greased with butter and sprinkled with flour, or else in a baking tin, keeping it not more than half an inch thick, and cutting it after baking in the shape of diamonds and dusting with powdered sugar. 193
A sponge batter given by weight rather than by cup, with no oven temperature and no baking time — both have to be supplied. It is closer to an Italian pasta genovese than to the shell-shaped French madeleine.
- The weightsFour and a half ounces sugar is about 2/3 cup; three ounces flour is a scant 3/4 cup; one ounce butter is two tablespoons. Weighing is worth doing here, since the whole structure rests on a high sugar-to-flour ratio.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. A thin sponge of this kind bakes at 350F: 10 to 14 minutes in a half-inch sheet, 8 to 10 in small molds. It is done when the surface springs back and the edges just begin to shrink from the pan.
- "Stir for fifteen minutes"This is the hinge. The instruction is not padding — the lift is largely air, beaten into the yolk-and-sugar base and into the whites. With a stand mixer on medium-high, 5 to 6 minutes gets you to the pale, thick ribbon stage the original calls "whitish." Do not shorten it.
- Drying the flourSun-drying or warming flour was a way of driving out moisture from sacks stored in damp pantries. Modern bagged flour is dry enough; skip it. If you do warm it, let it cool before it meets the batter.
- "A pinch of bi-carbonate"Read this as about 1/8 teaspoon baking soda, no more. There is no acid in the batter to react with it, so it does little lifting and too much will taste soapy and turn the crumb yellow.
- Order of foldingAdd the melted butter to the yolk base before the whites, as written, and have the butter barely warm — hot butter will slacken the foam. Fold the beaten whites in two or three additions with a spatula rather than stirring them.
- PansButtered-and-floured little molds, or a quarter-sheet pan lined with parchment for the diamond-cut version. Half an inch is the maximum; thicker and the center stays damp before the edges color.
- YieldRoughly 18 to 20 small cakes, or a 9x13 sheet cut into two dozen diamonds. Best the day they are made; the crumb dries quickly with so little fat.
The Italian Cook Book (1919), compiled by Maria Gentile, drew heavily on Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene, and this pasta maddalena follows Artusi's formula of the same name closely. Despite the shared saint's name, it is not the French madeleine of Commercy with its ribbed shell and hump; Italian usage attached "maddalena" to a plain, sugar-heavy egg sponge, and the Spanish magdalena is often described as a relative. What dates the recipe is not the flavoring — lemon peel and a little soda were standard — but the instruction to dry the flour and to stir for a quarter of an hour, both of which assume a kitchen without reliably dry storage or a mechanical beater.