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Portuguese Cake
(Focaccia alla Portoghese) Sweet almonds, five ounces.
Granulated sugar, five ounces.
Potato meal, one and a half ounce.
Three eggs.
One big orange or two small.
First mix the yolks of the eggs with the sugar, then add the flour, then the almonds skinned and chopped fine, then the orange juice (through a colander) then a taste of orange peel. Finally add to the mixture the whites of the eggs well beaten.
Put in a paper mold greased evenly with butter, with a thickness of about an inch and bake in a very moderately hot oven. After baked, cover with a white glaze or frost, made with powdered sugar, lemon juice and the white of eggs. 197
A flourless almond and orange cake of the Iberian convent type, leavened only by beaten egg whites. The measurements are by weight, which makes it easy to follow exactly.
- Weights, not cupsFive ounces almonds is about 1 cup whole nuts; five ounces sugar is about 3/4 cup; one and a half ounces potato meal is closer to 1/4 cup. Weigh them if you can, since the ratio of nut to starch is what holds the cake together.
- Potato mealThis is potato starch (potato flour in older British and American usage), not dried potato flakes. It is sold in most supermarkets and in kosher and Asian groceries; cornstarch behaves similarly here if you cannot find it.
- "Then add the flour"There is no wheat flour in the ingredient list. The flour meant is the potato meal, added to the yolk-and-sugar base before the almonds.
- Blanching and chopping"Skinned" means blanched: pour boiling water over the almonds, let stand a minute, and slip the skins off. Chop fine or pulse in a processor, but stop short of almond butter -- a little texture is wanted.
- A very moderately hot ovenRead this as a moderate oven, somewhere around 325-350F. The cake is mostly egg and nut, and a hotter oven browns the outside before the centre sets. Bake until a skewer comes out clean, roughly 30-40 minutes at the one-inch depth specified.
- The paper moldPaper cases of this kind were made up from stiff paper, though the recipe does not say how. Line an 8-inch round or square pan with buttered parchment; the batter should sit about an inch deep, no more, or the timing collapses.
- Folding the whitesThis is the hinge. The whites are the only leavening, so beat them to soft-firm peaks and fold in in two or three additions, cutting through rather than stirring.
- The glazePowdered sugar, lemon juice and egg white is uncooked royal icing. It is not heated at any point, so use pasteurised whites or meringue powder if serving to anyone vulnerable.
- YieldAn 8-inch cake, eight small servings. It is rich and keeps well for two or three days, covered.
This comes from Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919), a compact English-language collection aimed at American households curious about Italian home cooking. Focaccia here carries its older, broader sense of a flat baked thing rather than the oiled yeast bread the word now brings to mind -- Italian cookbooks of the period use it freely for flat cakes and tortes. The "Portuguese" label attaches to a whole family of Iberian sweets built on almonds, sugar, eggs and citrus with little or no wheat, a style generally traced to the convent kitchens of Portugal and southern Spain, where egg yolks left over from other uses and cheap Mediterranean almonds shaped an entire repertoire of dense, moist cakes. The potato starch is the one modern touch: a commercially produced ingredient that gave cooks a neutral binder without the weight of wheat.