Home › Cakes, Puddings, and Pastry › Russian Cake
Russian Cake
Mix the yolks of 5 eggs and 1/4 pound of sugar; add slowly 3 ounces flour, 2 ounces chopped almonds, a spoonful of anise seed, and the whites of eggs beaten stiff. Bake in long narrow tins lined with paper, cut in slices, and dry in the oven until crisp, before serving.
This is a twice-baked sponge in the biscotti and rusk family: a lean whisked batter, baked in a loaf, sliced, then dried until crisp. The original gives no temperatures, so the numbers below fill in what a period cook would have judged by hand.
- The hinge: two separate bakesThe first bake sets the loaf; the second dries the slices through to the centre. Slice while the loaf is barely warm rather than hot, or the crumb tears, and let the slices dry rather than brown.
- Weights in modern termsA quarter pound of sugar is about 115 g (a scant 2/3 cup); 3 ounces of flour is about 85 g (2/3 cup, spooned); 2 ounces of chopped almonds is about 55 g (a scant 1/2 cup).
- "A spoonful" of aniseGenuinely ambiguous. A teaspoon of whole anise seed suits the quantity of batter; two teaspoons gives a pronounced liquorice note.
- Oven temperaturesBake the loaf at 350F until a skewer comes out clean, roughly 25-30 minutes for a narrow tin. Dry the slices at 275-300F, turning once, until they snap rather than bend.
- Tins and paper"Long narrow tins" means something in the range of a small loaf or a pate mould, 3 to 4 inches wide. Parchment replaces the lining paper of the original and lifts the fragile loaf out intact.
- Folding, not stirringThere is no chemical leavening here. The whisked whites are the only lift, so they go in last in two or three additions and the flour is folded, not beaten, or the cake bakes dense and the slices dry hard instead of crisp.
- AlmondsChop them by hand to a coarse rubble; ground almonds turn the batter heavy. Blanched or skin-on both work, the latter giving more colour in the slice.
- Yield and keepingOne small loaf gives roughly 20 to 24 slices. Fully dried, they keep several weeks in a tin and suit tea, coffee, or a glass of wine rather than being eaten as cake.
"Russian cake" here is not a single named Russian pastry but a traveller's label, of the sort that fills collections of foreign cookery, where dishes were gathered abroad and titled by country of origin. What the method actually describes is a rusk: a lean egg-foam loaf baked, sliced and returned to a cooling oven to dry, the same technique behind Russian sukhari, German zwieback and Italian biscotti. Drying was practical as well as pleasant, since a crisp, low-fat biscuit keeps for weeks where a buttery cake will not, and such biscuits are often said to have accompanied tea in Russian households. Anise seed, common in Eastern and Central European baking and much less so in British cake of the period, is probably what struck the compiler as foreign enough to warrant the name.