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Old Fashioned Seed Cake
2 cupfuls sugar 1 1/2 cupfuls Crisco 4 cupfuls flour 1 teaspoonful salt 2 tablespoonfuls carraway seeds 12 eggs Cream Crisco and sugar thoroughly together, then drop in eggs one by one, beating each one in well before next is added, sift in flour and salt, add carraway seeds. Turn into Criscoed and papered loaf tin and bake in moderately hot oven one and a half hours.
Sufficient for one large cake.
A pound-cake formula in all but name: no baking powder, no soda, no liquid beyond the eggs. Everything depends on air beaten into the fat and the eggs, so treat the creaming and the egg addition as the recipe's real technique.
- The hinge: aerationTwelve eggs and nothing else lift this cake. Cream the shortening and sugar until visibly pale and fluffy, then add the eggs one at a time, beating each until the batter is smooth and no longer slick before the next goes in. If it curdles, a spoonful of the flour will bring it back.
- "Moderately hot oven"The book gives no figures; the term was generally reckoned somewhere in the 375-400F range. For a cake this dense and this long in the oven, 350F is the safer reading — check at an hour and tent with foil once the top has browned.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it. Modern vegetable shortening is a close enough substitute, though it is a reformulated product and not the same fat; unsalted butter gives far better flavour, though a slightly heavier crumb. "Criscoed and papered" simply means greased and lined with paper.
- Pan sizeFour cups of flour and a dozen eggs make something on the order of three quarts of batter — more than one standard 9x5 loaf tin will hold. Use two large loaf tins or a 10-inch tube pan, and fill no more than two-thirds.
- CupfulsThe 8-fluid-ounce cup, as now. Four cupfuls of flour is about 1 lb 2 oz; spoon it into the cup rather than scooping, or the cake turns dry.
- CarawayTwo tablespoons is assertive by current taste, and old caraway goes stale and soapy. Buy fresh seed and warm it in a dry pan for a minute before adding — it wakes the oils up considerably.
- Doneness and yieldA skewer should come out clean and the cake pull slightly from the sides; 90 minutes is plausible for one very large cake, less if divided. Cool in the tin 15 minutes. It keeps a week wrapped, and improves after a day.
Seed cake is one of the oldest surviving English cakes, traditionally associated with the end of wheat sowing, and often linked to the caraway comfits that Elizabethan cooks used in rich egg batters. By the eighteenth century it had settled into more or less this form — a pound-cake body, no leavening but eggs, caraway for perfume — and it stayed on tea tables well into the twentieth, which is why it turns up here labelled "old fashioned." That label is doing work: this book is a promotional volume built around Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced in 1911, and putting the new fat inside a cake everyone's grandmother made was exactly the argument its publishers wanted to make. The reliance on twelve eggs rather than a chemical leavener points to the recipe's older ancestry.