Seed Cakes
2/3 cup Cottolene. 2 cups sugar. 2 eggs well beaten. 1 teaspoon soda. 1 cup buttermilk. Flour. 1 teaspoon salt. 1½ tablespoons caraway seeds.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene, add sugar gradually, add well beaten egg, soda dissolved in milk, salt, seeds, and flour to make a soft Supplementary Recipes dough. Chill the dough and shape as other cookies. Place a seeded raisin or the half of a pecan nut meat in center of each before baking.
The printed page has lost part of its ingredient column — the fat, sugar, egg, soda and milk are named in the method but their quantities are gone. What follows fills in the vessels, the shortening and the baking, and flags what genuinely cannot be recovered.
- Missing quantitiesThe caraway measure was checked against the printed page and reads 1½ tablespoons, as given here. Only the salt and caraway carry numbers: the amounts of Cottolene, sugar, egg, soda, milk, flour and raisins are absent, so proportions must be borrowed from another rolled cookie dough.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, discontinued long ago. Any solid vegetable shortening substitutes measure for measure; butter works but spreads more and browns faster.
- Soda in milkThe soda is dissolved in the milk rather than sifted with the flour, as many recipes of the period direct. Once it meets the liquid it begins working, so mix and get the dough chilled without dawdling.
- Chilling is the hingeThe recipe calls for the soft dough to be chilled before shaping. Give it time in the refrigerator and roll only a portion at a time while the rest stays cold, which helps keep the cakes from spreading together.
- "Shape as other cookies"The direction is a cross-reference to the book's other cookie recipes, which are not on this page; rolling and cutting is one reasonable reading. Around 1/4 inch gives a crisp seed cake.
- OvenNo temperature or time is given on the page. As a modern starting point, rolled cookies of this kind bake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges just colour.
- Caraway"Seed cake" in this period means caraway, not poppy or sesame. Warm the seeds briefly in a dry pan before adding them if yours have been in the cupboard a while; the volatile oil fades with age.
- The raisin or pecanPressed into the centre before baking as decoration. Seeded raisins meant raisins with the seeds removed by hand -- modern seedless raisins need no preparation.
Seed cake is one of the oldest surviving English baking traditions, a plain sweet dough flavoured with caraway that appears in household books from the sixteenth century onward and was traditionally associated with the end of the sowing season. By the time it reached an American book like this one it had shrunk from a large tea loaf to a rolled cookie, one of dozens of small "supplementary recipes" appended to the weekly menus. 52 Sunday Dinners was a promotional cookbook connected with the makers of Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil shortening pushed hard as a cheaper, lighter replacement for lard; the brand name appears in the method here as it does throughout the book, which is the point of the publication. Cottonseed oil was a by-product of the Southern cotton crop that industrial refiners turned into a kitchen staple in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and promotional cookbooks were how the habit was taught.