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Manx Cakes
Rub the zest of a large lemon on sufficient sugar-loaf sugar-to obtain all, weigh this, and add more, enough to make 8 ounces. Pound it, add 8 ounces rice flour, beat 8 eggs very light, dissolve the sugar in these, adding the flour slowly. Stir all, and bake in buttered tins about 1/2 hour. HONEY CAKES. (Basle, Switzerland.) Melt 2 ounces butter, add 1/2 pound of honey, stirring well, take off the fire, and let it cool. Add the minced rind of a lemon, 2 ounces sweet almonds, chopped fine, a little nutmeg, 1/2 ounce carbonate of soda, dissolved in a little water. Mix these well, and set in a cold place 12 hours. Roll out 1/2 inch thick, cut into squares, decorate with nuts and chopped citron, then bake 25 minutes in hot oven. This recipe makes 1 dozen.
Two separate recipes run together on the page: a rice-flour sponge cake from the Isle of Man and a Basel honey cake. Both are workable, but the units and the oven language need translating.
- Sugar-loaf sugarRefined sugar once came as a hard cone that was chipped and pounded at home. Rubbing the lemon on it strips the oil from the zest, which is the whole point of the step. Use sugar cubes and rub the lemon over them, or rub granulated sugar and zest together with your fingertips until damp and fragrant.
- Rice flourFine white rice flour, not glutinous (sweet) rice flour, and not the coarse grind sold for dredging. It has no gluten, so the eggs are the entire structure: beat them until pale, thick and ribboning before the sugar goes in, and fold the flour rather than stirring it hard.
- Oven for the Manx cakesNone is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, for the half hour stated. No yield is stated either; in small buttered tins the batter will make a good number of little cakes, and in one large tin it will need longer than the half hour.
- Butter the tins properlyA rice-flour batter with no chemical leavening and no fat in it clings badly. Butter well and dust with rice flour, or line with paper.
- Carbonate of soda in the honey cakesHalf an ounce is about three teaspoons, far more than modern practice for a batch this size; note too that as printed the recipe lists no flour, though it tells you to roll the dough out half an inch thick. Expect a dark, faintly alkaline, old-fashioned flavour. Two teaspoons gives a result closer to modern taste.
- Hot ovenRead as roughly 400 to 425F, watching closely, since honey doughs colour fast. Baked through, the squares will be firm and dry and will soften over a few days in a tin.
- Sweet almondsSimply ordinary almonds. The adjective distinguished them from bitter almonds, which were still sold in the period and are not used today.
- Rolling the honey doughChilled honey dough is stiff and sticky at once. Roll between sheets of paper, or on a surface floured lightly, and press the nuts and citron in firmly before baking or they fall off the finished squares.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century genre of collections gathering household recipes from abroad for American cooks, which is why a cake from the Isle of Man sits directly against one credited to Basel. The Manx cake is a rice-flour sponge of a type common across the British Isles in the nineteenth century; the trick of rubbing lemon zest onto loaf sugar to capture the oil appears in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward. The Basel honey cakes are recognisably the family of spiced honey doughs that Swiss and German bakers have made for centuries, generally traced to the medieval spice trade through Basel and surviving today as Basler Leckerli; the long cold rest before rolling is characteristic.