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Genoa Cake
(Italy.) Mix 1/4 pound currants, 1/4 pound candied orange and lemon peel and citron, chopped and mixed, a pinch of cinnamon, 6 tablespoonfuls of sugar, 1/2 pound flour, and a spoonful of lemon juice. Beat these well, add 4 beaten eggs and 2 spoonfuls of brandy. Pour into a shallow pan and bake 20 minutes. Ice with sugar icing flavored with vanilla, and let it brown a little. Eat cold, cut in slices.
A compact fruit cake leavened by nothing but beaten egg, from a period when "receipts from abroad" were often copied down in shorthand. Read the order of operations carefully before you start, because as written the dry ingredients are beaten together before any liquid goes in.
- The hinge: the eggs are the leaveningThere is no baking powder and no soda here, so the four eggs must be beaten until thick and pale and folded in with a light hand. Beat them separately and fold the flour-and-fruit mixture into them rather than stirring the eggs into a stiff dry mass, or the cake will bake into a brick.
- No fat is listedGenoa cake as usually printed in British books is a buttered cake; this version omits fat entirely, which gives a dry, close, almost biscuit-like crumb closer to a panforte or a spice slice than to a modern cake. If you want the familiar tender result, creaming 4 oz softened butter with the sugar first is one way to go, but it is a departure from the text.
- "Spoonful" and "tablespoonful"Period spoon measures were not standardised and may have differed somewhat from the modern 15 ml, though probably not enough to matter here. The unqualified 'spoonful' of lemon juice and '2 spoonfuls' of brandy are genuinely ambiguous; a tablespoon apiece is the sensible reading.
- WeightsA quarter pound is 4 oz (about 115 g); half a pound of flour is 8 oz, roughly 1 3/4 cups scooped and levelled. Six tablespoons of sugar is about 75 g, which is restrained -- the candied peel supplies much of the sweetness.
- Candied peel and citronCitron is the thick-rinded fruit sold candied in translucent green and yellow cubes; it is still available at Christmas and from Italian grocers, and mixed candied peel substitutes acceptably. Chop it small so the slices hold together when cut.
- Oven and panThe original gives no temperature. A shallow pan and a 20-minute bake point to a moderate oven, 350F, in a lined 8-inch square or 9-inch round tin; the batter should sit no more than an inch deep. Test with a skewer at 20 minutes and give it up to 10 more if needed.
- Icing that browns"Let it brown a little" means returning the iced cake to a cooling oven or under a low broiler for a minute or two until the sugar glaze sets and takes colour. Watch it continuously; a thin sugar icing scorches in seconds.
- Yield and keepingAn 8-inch shallow cake, about 12 to 16 thin slices. It is meant to be eaten cold and cut fine; with no fat in it, expect it to dry rather than improve on standing, so wrap it well.
Genoa cake is a fruited, usually butter-rich cake with candied citron and peel whose name is generally traced to the Ligurian port through which so much of that candied fruit reached northern Europe; Genoa and nearby Leghorn were long the trade's centre. Confusingly, the name has attached itself to more than one thing -- the French pain de G u00eanes is an almond cake, and British Genoa cake is closer to a light fruit cake -- so the label indicates a family of candied-fruit cakes rather than a single fixed formula. This version's terseness is typical of collections of foreign dishes translated for American cooks, with the quantities of butter, leavening and baking detail that a native cook would have supplied from habit simply left out.