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Queen Charlotte's Cake
(England.) Mix 1 pint flour, 1 cup warm milk, 1/2 yeast cake, and 1/2 pound butter beaten to a cream with 1/4 pound powdered sugar, 4 eggs, 1/2 pound chopped candied peel, a teaspoonful of cinnamon, and a cup of chopped almonds. Mix as usual, let it rise before adding 1 cup more flour and the nuts and peel, etc., then let it rise again. Pour into a Turk's head mould and bake 1 hour. While hot, pour over a syrup, made of 1 cup sugar, 2 tablespoonfuls of water, and a teaspoonful of vanilla, wine, or cordial. Dust the top with powdered sugar and serve hot, in slices.
This is a yeast-raised butter cake in the kugelhopf family, not a chemically leavened one, so the two rises are the whole method. Plan on four to five hours from start to table.
- The hinge: two rises, heavy doughThe butter, eggs and sugar make this a rich dough that ferments slowly. Give the first rise until roughly doubled and the second until the dough reaches about an inch below the rim of the mould, however long that takes; going by clock rather than by look will give you a dense cake.
- A pint of flourFlour is measured by volume here: a pint is 2 cups, about 9 oz, with another cup (4 1/2 oz) worked in later. Total is roughly 13 1/2 oz.
- Half a yeast cakeCompressed yeast cakes of this era were sold in more than one size, the small commercial cake being around 0.6 oz. On that basis half a cake is on the order of 1 teaspoon of active dry yeast, or a little less instant.
- Butter and sugar weights1/2 pound butter is 2 sticks (225 g); 1/4 pound powdered sugar is 4 oz, which is about 1/2 cup if the period sense of finely ground granulated sugar is meant and closer to 1 cup of modern confectioners' sugar; 1/2 pound candied peel is roughly 1 1/3 to 1 1/2 cups chopped.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A rich yeast cake of this size wants a moderate oven, 350F, for the stated hour; tent with foil if the crust colours early, and pull it at an internal temperature of 190-200F.
- Turk's head mouldA fluted, turban-shaped ring tin; moulds of this family lie behind the modern bundt pan. Any 9- to 10-cup tube or kugelhopf mould works; butter and flour it thoroughly, since the sugar in the dough sticks.
- The syrup is barely a syrupOne cup sugar to two tablespoons water is a paste rather than a pourable liquid. Warm it gently until the sugar dissolves and add water a spoonful at a time until it pours; a scant 1/4 cup of liquid in total makes a glaze that soaks in while the cake is hot.
- "Wine, or cordial"Kirsch, rum, brandy or an orange liqueur all suit the peel and almonds. Added off the heat, a good deal of the alcohol remains in the cake.
- YieldA 9- to 10-inch ring gives 10 to 12 slices. It is meant to be eaten warm the day it is baked; by the second day it wants toasting.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century genre of American collections that gathered dishes country by country, each headed with its nation of origin, so that a home cook could travel by dinner table. This one is labelled England, but its bones are continental: yeast dough enriched with butter and eggs, studded with candied peel and almonds, baked in a fluted ring and soaked with syrup, which is the pattern of the Alsatian and German kugelhopf and its French cousin the savarin. The attribution to Queen Charlotte, consort of George III, is traditional rather than documented; she was born Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and is often credited in English cookery writing with bringing German baking habits to the British court, a claim repeated far more often than it is evidenced. What is certain is that candied citrus peel and almonds were the standard luxury studding of festive English cakes throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that a royal name on a cake sold it as reliably in 1900 as it had in 1800.