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King's Tart
(Germany.) Mix one pinch each of cloves, cinnamon, and mace with 4 ounces of chopped almonds, 2 ounces of chopped peanuts, 2 ounces of citron, and 2 ounces of stoned raisins, the rind and juice of a lemon, and 2 1/2 ounces of bread-crumbs, wet with milk. Beat in 6 eggs the whites and yolks whisked separately, and 4 ounces of sugar. Pour into a shallow dish, and bake in a moderate oven. Turn out when cold, and serve with a sugar syrup flavored with wine or cordial.
A flourless spiced almond pudding baked in a shallow dish — closer to a torte than a tart, despite the name. The instructions assume a cook who knows what a folded egg batter should look like.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" is roughly 350-375F. In a shallow dish the batter is thin, so start checking at about 25 minutes; it is done when the centre is just set and springs back to a light touch.
- Fold, don't stirThe only leavening here is whipped egg white. Beat the yolks with the sugar, fold the nut-and-crumb mixture in, then fold in the stiff whites last and in thirds. Overworking at this stage gives a flat, dense slab.
- BreadcrumbsUse dry, fine crumbs from a plain white loaf, not coarse fresh crumbs and not seasoned commercial crumbs. "Wet with milk" means moistened until soft and crumbly, roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons — not soaked to a paste.
- Chopped almondsFour ounces is about 3/4 cup of almonds. Chop them by hand or pulse briefly; ground almond meal turns the texture pasty rather than nubbly.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in the baking aisle around the winter holidays. Candied orange or lemon peel is an acceptable stand-in. Chop it small, as large pieces sink.
- Weights to volume2 oz citron is a scant 1/3 cup chopped; 2 oz raisins about 1/3 cup; 4 oz sugar is 1/2 cup plus a spoonful. A pinch is generally taken as somewhere between 1/16 and 1/8 teaspoon.
- Turning outButter the dish and line the base with parchment. The recipe says to turn out when cold for a reason: warm, this pudding is fragile and will crack across the middle.
- The syrupSimple syrup — equal weights sugar and water, boiled a minute — flavoured off the heat with sherry, Madeira or a fruit cordial. Spoon it over each portion at the table rather than over the whole cake, which will go soggy.
- YieldSix eggs and a shallow dish give six to eight servings. It keeps two days covered and is arguably better on the second.
The name is a straight translation of the German Königstorte, a term used loosely in nineteenth-century German baking for a rich, spiced, nut-and-fruit cake — the "king" often said to signal costly ingredients rather than any particular monarch, though the word is also commonly linked to Königsberg. Its construction belongs to an older European tradition in which breadcrumbs and ground nuts stood in for flour, a technique still visible in Central European nut tortes and in Passover baking. The peanuts suggest, though they do not prove, that this version has passed through an American kitchen; peanuts were cheap and plentiful in the United States by 1900 and turn up as a thrifty extender for expensive almonds. With a Saucepan Over the Sea collected dishes gathered on European travel and presented them for the home cook, so a recipe like this arrives compressed to a single paragraph, with quantities in ounces and the oven described only by feel — the assumption being that the reader had made a baked pudding before.