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Currant Cakes
For currant cakes baked in a dish or mould several recipes are given under CHRISTMAS CAKES, PLUM CAKES, etc.; two or three more are given here for cakes, which may either be dropped in small rounds on a buttered tin, or put into a buttered dish, and baked in a quick oven. Clean and pick two ounces of currants; rub a quarter of a pound of fresh butter into half a pound of flour, add the currants, a little grated nutmeg, and four table-spoonfuls of sugar. Mix all together with two well-beaten eggs, a table-spoonful of brandy, and sufficient new milk to make a light dough. Roll out thin, and cut into cakes. Or wash and pick one pound of currants; beat one pound of fresh butter to a cream, add one pound of sugar, one pound and a half of flour, a tea-spoonful of powdered cinnamon, a tea-spoonful of grated nutmeg, the currants, and four eggs well beaten. Another recipe: Clean and pick half a pound of dried currants; beat a quarter of a pound of butter to a cream; mix with it a quarter of a pound of sifted sugar, half a pound of dried flour, the yolks of four and the whites of three eggs well beaten, the currants, and a tea-spoonful of powdered cinnamon; beat all well together for a quarter of an hour. Another way (economical): Rub a quarter of a pound of dripping into one pound of flour; add a pinch of salt, two heaped tea-spoonfuls of baking powder, three ounces of picked currants, two table-spoonfuls of sugar, half a nutmeg grated, and enough milk or water to form a stiff dough. Time, about twenty minutes to bake. Sufficient, one pound of flour, with the other ingredients, will make about one dozen cakes. Probable cost, from 1/2d. to 2d. each.
Four variants of the same idea: a rich currant dough either rolled and cut, or dropped in rounds, and baked hot. The first and last are workable as written; the middle two are outsized and unraised, and need reading carefully before you commit a pound of butter.
- Quick ovenSomewhere in the region of 425-450F; equivalences for the term vary. Small rounds want the upper end of that; a dish or mould of the mixture is better nearer 400F so the centre sets before the edges colour.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants — small dried grapes — not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. "Clean and pick" means rinsing off the old packing dust and pulling out stalks and stones; modern packaged currants need only a quick look over, and a rinse then a thorough pat dry if they seem gritty.
- New milkNew milk is simply fresh, unsoured whole milk. Use whole milk, and add it a spoonful at a time — the first recipe wants a dough stiff enough to roll thin, and it takes very little.
- Dried flourFlour was dried and warmed by the fire to drive off damp from a stone larder. Skip it; sift modern flour and use it as it is.
- The unraised versionsThe second and third recipes contain no baking powder or soda. All their lift comes from creaming the butter and beating the eggs, so the third recipe's instruction to beat for a quarter of an hour is the hinge — it is aerating, not mixing. A few minutes in a stand mixer on medium-high will do comparable work. Underbeat these and you get a heavy, biscuit-like cake.
- Scale down the second recipeA pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of currants and a pound and a half of flour, plus four eggs, is a bakery batch of some four and a half to five pounds of mixture. Quarter it for a domestic tin.
- DrippingThe economical version uses dripping, usually beef, which gives a savoury, faintly meaty richness. Lard or solid vegetable shortening behaves much the same way; butter gives a different, sweeter cake. Rub it in cold, as for pastry.
- NutmegHalf a nutmeg grated into a pound of flour is assertive by current taste. Start with a quarter of a whole nutmeg and judge from there.
- Yield and timingThe book's own figure — about a dozen cakes from a pound of flour — implies fairly substantial rounds. Twenty minutes suits those; small drop rounds are done in 12-15, when the bottoms are set and the edges just browned.
- The costing"1/2d. to 2d. each" is pre-decimal: a halfpenny to twopence. It is a period price signal, not a conversion worth attempting.
Cassell's treats currant cakes in an alphabetical entry, cross-referring to Christmas and plum cakes, because in Victorian usage "cake" covered everything from a rich fruited loaf to what we would now call a rock cake or a currant biscuit han method — the difference lay in richness rather than method. Dried currants, imported in bulk from Greece and the Ionian islands (the name comes from Corinth, by way of "raisins of Corauntz"), were among the cheapest sweet store-cupboard goods in a British kitchen, which is why the same dish could be pitched at both ends of the household economy. The sequence of four recipes here is doing exactly that: the first is a butter-and-brandy cake for a family with money, the last replaces butter with beef dripping and eggs with baking powder, and the price note — a halfpenny to twopence a cake — makes the point that the plainest version was within reach of almost anyone. The appearance of baking powder in only the final recipe may hint at date: chemical raising agents were widely sold by the later nineteenth century but had not yet displaced the older reliance on long beating and well-whisked eggs.