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Honey Cake
Stir half a pint of sour cream into a pint of flour. Add about half a tea-spoonful of ground ginger, a quarter of a tea-spoonfuls of sugar and honey, according to taste. Mix thoroughly, and when the cake is ready for the oven, add half a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda, dissolved in a small quantity of hot water. Beat again for a few minutes, pour the mixture into a buttered mould, and bake in a good oven. This cake may be eaten either warm or cold. Time, three-quarters of an hour to bake. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for four persons.
A soda-raised honey cake of the plainest kind, leavened by the reaction between sour cream and carbonate of soda. The instructions as printed are garbled in one place, so read the notes before measuring.
- The hinge: add the soda lastThe recipe is emphatic that the dissolved soda goes in only when the tin and oven are ready. The lift comes entirely from soda meeting the acid in the sour cream, and that gas begins escaping immediately. The recipe allows a few minutes' beating after the soda; keep it brief and get the cake into the oven.
- The garbled measurement"A quarter of a tea-spoonfuls of sugar and honey, according to taste" is a printing error and cannot be reconstructed with confidence. A quarter teaspoon of either is negligible in a cake for four; the recipe's own words leave both as sweeteners to taste, so sweeten to taste with honey doing most of the work.
- Pints and flourMeasurements are by volume, and the pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz. A pint of flour is roughly 2½ US cups, about 10 oz depending on how it is scooped; half a pint of cream is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups.
- "Sour cream"In nineteenth-century usage this means cream that has soured naturally — thinner and sharper than the stabilised commercial sour cream sold today. Modern full-fat sour cream works, but the batter will be stiffer; thin it with a spoonful or two of milk or buttermilk to a thick pouring consistency.
- Carbonate of sodaBaking soda. Half a teaspoon to a pint of flour is modest; dissolving it in hot water, as directed, prevents the bitter yellow specks that undissolved soda leaves behind.
- "A good oven"The book gives no temperature; for a cake of this size and time, somewhere around 350-375F is a reasonable modern reading. Honey browns faster than sugar, so check at 35 minutes and tent with foil if the top is colouring before the centre is set.
- The mouldA buttered 1-quart charlotte mould, a 6-inch round tin or a small loaf tin all suit the quantity. Butter thoroughly — honey batters stick.
- Yield and keepingFour servings as written. Like most honey cakes it improves after a day wrapped, when the crumb moistens and the ginger comes forward.
Honey cakes are among the oldest sweet baked goods in Europe, predating cheap refined sugar by centuries, and they survive in a great many regional forms — German Lebkuchen, Dutch ontbijtkoek, the Jewish lekach eaten at the New Year, and plain British ginger-and-honey cakes like this one. What dates the Cassell's version is not the honey but the leavening: sour cream and carbonate of soda, a pairing that let a household raise a cake in minutes without yeast, eggs or a long beating. Commercial baking powder had been available since the middle of the nineteenth century, but the older acid-plus-alkali method persisted in kitchens where soured cream was simply a fact of the dairy shelf. The costing of one shilling and the note that it serves four place this among the book's economical family cakes rather than its company baking.