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Banbury Cakes
These rich, well-known cakes are prepared from a mince called Banbury meat, made with the following ingredients: half a pound of butter beaten to a cream, half a pound of lemon and orange-peel cut up fine, one pound of currants, half an ounce of cinnamon, two and a half ounces of allspice. Mix all thoroughly, and keep it in a covered jar for use. The paste for these buns should be tolerably rich, rolled out thin, and cut into rounds or squares. To a layer of the mince, put on one round, cover over with another. Flatten with the hand, and moisten the edges with white of egg to make them adhere. Before putting into the oven brush the cakes over with the froth of eggs and sugar. They will take fifteen minutes to bake, and may be eaten hot or cold.
Cassell's gives the filling in bulk and leaves the pastry, the oven and the yield to the cook's judgement. Two things need attention before you start: the spicing, which is extreme by modern taste, and the fact that no oven temperature is stated at all.
- The spice is the hingeTwo and a half ounces of allspice and half an ounce of cinnamon to roughly two pounds of fruit and butter is around a dozen tablespoons of ground allspice — enough to make the filling medicinal and numbing. A teaspoon or two of each, tasted as you go, gives the warm, faintly clove-like character the cakes are known for.
- "Banbury meat"Meat here means nothing more than the filling or mixture, the same sense preserved in mincemeat, which today usually contains no meat. Nothing in the jar is animal but the butter.
- Keeping the minceA covered jar in a cold larder was the Victorian answer; creamed butter with candied peel and currants has no preservative to speak of, so refrigerate it and use within a week or two, or freeze it. Bring it back to room temperature before spreading or it will tear the pastry.
- "Tolerably rich" pasteThe recipe does not name a pastry; 'tolerably rich' points to a puff or rough puff rather than a plain shortcrust. About 500 g of bought all-butter puff stands in perfectly well; roll it to around 3 mm.
- OvenNone is specified. Puff pastry wants a hot oven, 425F/220C, and fifteen minutes at that heat is about right for cakes of this size.
- The glaze"The froth of eggs and sugar" is usually taken as whisked egg — the white, or a whole egg — brushed on and then dusted with caster or granulated sugar, though the recipe says only 'eggs'. It bakes to the white, crackly, sugar-crusted top that distinguishes these from a plain fruit turnover.
- ShapeBanbury cakes are traditionally oval rather than round — cut circles, fill, seal, then flatten and coax them into a long oval. Slash the tops two or three times so steam escapes and the lids do not blow off.
- YieldThe quantity of mince here is generous, roughly two pounds, and will fill three or four dozen cakes. Make the full jar and use it over several batches, or scale the filling to a quarter.
Banbury cakes are named for the Oxfordshire market town, and their reputation there is old enough that by the early seventeenth century a "Banbury man" was a stock joke on the London stage \>Bartholomew Fair a puritan baker of Banbury. A shop in Parson's Street traded on the cakes for centuries and is generally said to have been selling them from the 1630s. They belong to a small family of northern and midland pastries built the same way — currants and butter and spice sealed between two rounds of rich paste and flattened — of which Eccles and Chorley cakes are the better-known survivors. Cassell's treats the filling as a standing store, mixed in quantity and kept in a jar, which is how a Victorian kitchen handled anything sweet and fatty enough to sit for a while: the same logic that produced mincemeat put up in autumn for use through the winter.