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Cheltenham Cakes
Take six pounds of flour, a quarter of a pound of butter, the yolks of two eggs, and a tea-cupful of yeast; mix all together with some warm milk; set it to rise for an hour; make into round cakes; let them rise again, and bake in a moderate oven for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A plain yeasted dough of the sort meant to be split, toasted and buttered rather than eaten as a sweet cake. The quantities are for a household or a small shop, and the liquid is left entirely to the cook's judgement.
- Scale it downSix pounds of flour will give something like two to three dozen cakes. Quartering the quantities — 1 1/2 lb flour, 1 oz butter, and a single yolk, rounding up from the half yolk the arithmetic actually gives — is more realistic for a domestic oven.
- The teacupful of yeastThis means barm, the liquid foam skimmed from brewing, not a dry granule. A Victorian teacup is usually reckoned at about a gill, some 5 fl oz, but barm's strength varied wildly. For 6 lb flour, about 2 tbsp of dried active yeast or 4 tbsp fresh is the equivalent order of magnitude.
- Milk is unmeasured"Some warm milk" is the only guide. Reckon on roughly 55-60 per cent of the flour weight in liquid for a soft, rollable dough — around 2 3/4 pints for the full six pounds — and add it gradually.
- Oven heatA moderate oven is 350F/180C. Small flat cakes baking in only ten to fifteen minutes want the upper end of that, 375F/190C, so they colour before the crumb dries out.
- Warm the milk, not the butter inThe butter is a token quarter pound across six pounds of flour, so it is far quicker to melt it into the warm milk than to rub it in. The milk should be blood-warm, not hot, or it will check the yeast.
- The two risingsAn hour for the bulk rise assumes a warm Victorian kitchen and vigorous barm. Judge by volume rather than the clock — roughly doubled — and give the shaped cakes a second prove until they feel puffy and slack, usually 30 to 45 minutes.
- Shape"Round cakes" probably means flattened rounds, an inch or so thick, rather than domed buns; the ten-to-fifteen-minute bake suits a thin cake, and a flat face is what is wanted for splitting and toasting.
- Cost1s. 6d. for the whole batch is a reminder of scale: this is bread economics, not confectionery.
Cheltenham built its reputation on its mineral springs in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and like Bath it is often said to have lent its name to a family of yeasted cakes and buns sold to visitors taking the waters. Cassell's places this among the plainest of them: barely any butter, no sugar, no fruit, and a bake of a quarter of an hour, to be split and buttered, closer to a muffin or a Sally Lunn in spirit than to the richer, candied-peel Bath bun. The recipe reaches back to a time when a household's leavening might still come from a brewer or a publican in the form of barm, though compressed yeast was commercially available by the late-Victorian period; that older habit is why the yeast is measured in a teacup rather than by weight, and why the rising time is offered so casually. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for late-Victorian middle-class kitchens, prints costings for almost every entry; the 1s. 6d. here is the sort of figure a mistress checking her cook's accounts would want to see.