PORTUGAL TEA CAKES.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1015, 3 January 1911, Page 9

PORTUGAL TEA CAKES.

The-- study of old English cookery-books;-is as; useful as it is fSsciuatin.', {■ays an English writer; for although 'it 13 a matter of history that our forbears nto more heartily, not to say grossly, than .we do, yet .their recipes are often simpler arid less sophisticated than those fashionable nowadays; although there were, of course, N many exceptions. Hero is, for instance, E. Smith's 'Compleat Housewife," '-published in 1736, which, as Mr. Careiv Hazlitt says, "may be securely taken to exhibit the srato of knowledge in England upon this subject in the last quarter of the seventeenth century and the first quarter of the succeeding ono." 'The book opens with the words:— "It being grown as unfashionable for a Bo6k now to appear in publick without a Preface, as for a Lady to appear at a Ball without a Hoop-Petticoat,' I shall conform to Custom for Fashionsake, and not thro' any necessity." ."To make a New-market cheese to cut at two years old" does not, at first sight, apptai' an inspiring theme; and yet the first words of tho recipe are not lacking' pcetic suggestion:— "Any morning ill September, tako twenty quarts of new milk from the cow, and colour it with marigolds. . . ." It is not necessary to continue tho directions, taausa no ono wants to make a cheese or to, keep it two years. The same culinary work 'gives, however, a thoroughly practical cake recipe ■which has been.tried and proved excellent. It is singularly appropriate to the present foreign political situation, and makos a pleasant and judicious addition lo afternoon tea. "To make Fortug.il Cakes'.—Take a pound and a quarter of fin? (lour well dried and break a pound of butter into tho flour, and rub it in; add a pound of leaf-sugar beaten arid sifted, a nutmeg grated, four perfumed plums or somo amber-grease; mix those well together, and beat seven eggs, but four whites, with tlireo spoonfuls of oi'ange-flou'er-water; mix all these together, and beat them up'an hour; butter your littlo pans and just as they are going into tho oven,, fill them half full and searcc somo fine sugar over them; little more than a quarter of an hour will bake them. You may put n' handful of currants' into somo of them; take them out of tho pans as soon as they aro drawn, keep them dry; they wifl keep.good three months." "Four perfumed plums" may lio translated into Elviis' plums, chopped small. Ambergrcase, or ambergris, which is tho result of indigestion in the whale, is not to 1)0 recommended, although formerly much in use in highly-flavoured cookery.