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Cake, Common
Mix two and a half pounds of flour with half a pound of brown sugar. Stir in a tea-cupful of good yeast and half a pint of lukewarm milk. Knead these well together, and set the dough near the fire to rise. When it rises, add half a pound of picked currants, or two tea-spoonfuls of caraway-seeds, and half a pound of melted butter in another half pint of milk. Knead again, and let the mixture rise once more. Put it into tins, and bake in a moderate oven. Time to bake, about an hour. The above ingredients will be sufficient for two large cakes. Probable cost, 8d. each.
This is a yeast-raised cake in the older sense — an enriched sweet bread, closer to a barm brack or a plain bun loaf than to a creamed sponge. Two things decide whether it works: the temperature of the liquids and the patience given to the two rises.
- Keep the enrichment lukewarmThe melted butter and its half-pint of milk go into a living dough. If the butter is still hot it will kill the yeast and the second rise will never come. Cool the mixture to blood heat before working it in.
- The yeast measure is ambiguousA "tea-cupful of good yeast" points to a liquid yeast, most likely brewer's barm or a home-made ferment, and such yeasts varied greatly in strength. There is no honest one-to-one conversion; for 2½ lb of flour, about 2 teaspoons of instant dried yeast is a reasonable starting point, judging by the dough rather than the clock.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; a modern equivalent of roughly 350F/175C suits an enriched yeast dough, and about an hour at that heat is plausible for two large loaf-shaped cakes. Test with a skewer.
- Teacup and half-pintA Victorian teacup is reckoned at roughly a gill, about 5 fl oz. The half-pints here are imperial, 10 fl oz each, so the dough takes a full imperial pint of milk in total.
- "Picked" currantsDried currants of the period arrived with stalks and grit. Picking meant sorting and rubbing them clean. Modern packaged currants need only a rinse if they are dusty; if they are very dry, a brief soak improves them, but drain well or the dough goes slack.
- Two rises, both slowThe first is a plain flour-sugar-yeast dough; the second carries the fat and fruit, which weigh it down and slow it considerably. Allow the second rise as long as it takes to look visibly puffed — an hour and a half is not unusual — rather than turning it out on schedule.
- TinsThe quantity divides into two cakes of roughly 2½ lb of dough each, so use large loaf tins, well greased and lined, and fill no more than two-thirds.
- Yield and keepingTwo large cakes, each cutting into a dozen or more slices. Yeast-raised cakes of this kind are best fresh, and thereafter good toasted and buttered.
"Common cake" is a Victorian category rather than a specific dish: the plain, unspiced, everyday cake set against the rich fruit cakes kept for Christmas and weddings. What marks this one as belonging to an older tradition is the yeast. Before chemical leavening became cheap and reliable, household cakes were raised with barm begged or bought from a brewer, and the line between a sweet bread and a cake was blurry — the kneading, the two rises and the loaf tins. The choice offered between currants and caraway seeds is a familiar fork in the road of English plain baking, the second producing a version of the seed cake often said to have been a fixture of the tea table. Cassell's habit of printing a "probable cost" — eightpence a cake here — was aimed squarely at the mistress of a modest household budgeting her week, and it is one of the more useful things the book records about its own time.