Rock Cakes
1 cup Butter (or Lard), 1½ cups brown Sugar, 1/2 teaspoonful Salt, 2 Eggs, 2 cups Flour, 1/2 cup Raisins, 1/2 cup Currants, 1 teaspoonful Cinnamon, 3 tablespoonfuls sour Milk, Cream or Buttermilk, 1 teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda. 1/2 cup Walnut Meats.
Mix together thoroughly the sugar, butter, (or lard), salt, cinnamon, eggs, sour milk, (cream or buttermilk) with the Soda. The flour is then added to the batter. Rub a little flour between the fruits and nuts, then stir them in the above mixture. Roll out in strips and cut up in small pieces. Mark each with a fork crosswise, and bake on buttered cookie tins.
A stiff drop-and-cut fruit cookie from a soda advertising pamphlet, printed with at least one omission and a stray line of type from the next recipe. Read the whole thing before starting.
- The missing butterThe method calls for butter or lard, but no quantity appears in the ingredient list. The original figure is lost; something in the region of 1/2 cup (4 oz) of softened butter or lard suits a dough of this size and gives a dough firm enough to roll.
- The stray last line"1 cup Sugar, 1 cup sour Milk, 2 Eggs" belongs to an adjoining recipe and has run on here. Ignore it.
- Soda and acidOne teaspoon of soda is a great deal for three tablespoons of sour milk, and that liquid alone will not neutralise it. Dark brown sugar, being more acidic than light, helps; even so there may be a soapy edge.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk. Cultured buttermilk is the direct substitute; failing that, milk with a teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 375F for 10-12 minutes, until the edges are set and the bottoms browned. These are meant to stay firm and dry rather than soft.
- Rolling the doughThree tablespoons of liquid makes a very dry dough. Chill it half an hour before rolling; if it crumbles rather than holds, work in a tablespoon more buttermilk, not flour.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small black grape, not fresh red or black currants. Flouring the fruit and nuts, as directed, keeps them from sinking and from clumping in the stiff dough.
- YieldAbout three dozen small cakes, depending on how the strips are cut. They keep well in a tin for a week and harden as they age, which is part of the point.
Rock cakes are a British baking-tradition standby, said by tradition to be named for their rough, craggy tops rather than their texture, and they crossed to American cookbooks as an economical way to use dried fruit and a little sour milk. This version comes from one of the Arm & Hammer recipe pamphlets that Church & Dwight distributed, often tucked into soda packages or handed out by grocers, in which every recipe is built to demonstrate the product. The insistent capitalisation of "The Great Arm & Hammer Soda" is advertising copy, not emphasis on technique. Such booklets are a useful record of what home baking looked like when chemical leavening had to be sold to cooks, and the text as it survives has its defects: the butter measure is missing and the last line is orphaned, though whether that damage happened in the printing or in later transcription cannot be said.