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Devon Cakes
Rub half a pound of good fresh butter into one pound of flour, beat up an egg and mix it with half a pint of milk, and sweeten the milk with a quarter of a pound of sifted sugar. Mix the flour and milk together into a paste, and roll it out thin to be cut into any shapes liked. Bake for ten minutes on tin plates in a quick oven, with grated loaf sugar over them. Probable cost for this quantity, 1s. 4d.
A plain rolled sweet biscuit with no raising agent, so the handling matters more than the baking. Cassell's measures are imperial, and the dough as written is wetter than most modern rolled-cookie doughs.
- Quantities in metricHalf a pound of butter is 225g, one pound of flour about 450g (roughly 3½ cups), and a quarter pound of sugar 110g. Half an imperial pint of milk is 10 fl oz, or 1¼ US cups.
- A quick ovenUsually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F (200-230C); the book gives no temperature. Ten minutes at that heat suits cakes rolled thin; anything much thicker will colour before the centre sets.
- No leavening at allThere is no baking powder, soda or yeast here, so these bake flat and short-crisp rather than rising. Do not add a raising agent expecting the recipe to behave — it was not written for one.
- The dough will be softWith a full half-pint of milk to a pound of flour, the paste is slack by modern standards. Chill it well before rolling and flour the surface generously, or add flour a spoonful at a time until it rolls cleanly.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold as a hard cone, grated or nipped as needed. Coarse or pearl sugar gives the same crunchy scattered finish; ordinary granulated is the nearest everyday substitute.
- Tin platesThese are flat sheets of tinned iron, not pie plates. Use an unlined baking sheet, and line it with parchment since the sugar on top will melt and run at the edges.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; cut small from thinly rolled dough, this quantity makes a large batch. Cool them on a rack; they crisp as they cool and keep a week in a tin.
- The cost lineOne shilling and fourpence was the estimated ingredient cost for this quantity when the book was published. It has no bearing on the method.
Cassell's gives this among its plain teatime cakes. Half a pound of butter to a pound of flour is a generous proportion for a Victorian everyday biscuit, and the absence of any raising agent puts it closer to the shortbreads and "cakes" that predate the spread of chemical leavening in the second half of the nineteenth century. Devon and the wider West Country were dairy country, and it is sometimes suggested that a recipe carrying the county's name signalled butter or cream rather than lard or dripping, though that is an inference rather than a documented convention. The scattering of grated loaf sugar over the top is a period habit worth noticing: sugar was still commonly sold in hard cones that had to be broken and grated at home.