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Loaf Cake, for Luncheon, Etc
Beat half a pound of fresh butter to a cream. Mix with it six ounces of moist sugar and six well-beaten eggs. Add one pound of flour, three table-spoonfuls of rose-water, one table-spoonful of finely-chopped lemon-rind, one small nutmeg, grated, half a tea-spoonful of powdered cinnamon, a dessert-spoonful of dissolved carbonate of potash, and a small tea-cupful of milk. Beat all thoroughly. Line an earthen cake-mould with buttered paper, pour in the mixture, and bake in a moderate oven for about two hours. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
A pound-cake in all but name, leavened with pearlash rather than baking powder and perfumed with rose-water instead of vanilla. The proportions work; the leavening and the baking time are what need attention.
- Carbonate of potashThis is pearlash, potassium carbonate — an early chemical leavener, which needs a little acid (the moist sugar and the milk supply some) to give off its gas. A dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons, which is a heavy dose by modern standards, and unreacted potash leaves a soapy edge. Modern baking powder is the practical substitute, though not a spoon-for-spoon exchange.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" was an unrefined or partly refined brown sugar, damp and slightly sticky. Light brown sugar is the closest match; white caster sugar will work but the crumb will be paler and less fragrant.
- Spoon measuresA Victorian tablespoonful is about 1/2 fl oz (roughly a modern tablespoon), a dessert-spoonful about 2 teaspoons. Three tablespoons of rose-water is deliberate and assertive — if yours is a concentrated extract rather than a distilled water, cut it to a teaspoon and make up the liquid with milk.
- NutmegA "small nutmeg" grated whole comes to something like 1½ to 2 teaspoons. With the cinnamon and lemon rind alongside it, that is a strongly spiced cake; half that amount suits most palates now.
- Oven and timingA moderate oven is usually taken as about 350F, though the book gives no temperatures; two hours at that heat will dry a cake of this size. Bake nearer 325F and start testing with a skewer at 1 hour 15 minutes; a deep single loaf may want closer to 1 hour 40.
- The mouldAn earthen cake-mould lined with buttered paper translates to a deep round tin or a pair of loaf tins, lined with buttered parchment; judge by volume, since a 9-inch round and two 9x5-inch loaf tins do not hold the same amount. The paper is not optional — the recipe specifies it.
- The hingeEverything depends on beating the butter to a cream and working in the well-beaten eggs without splitting the mixture. Six eggs against half a pound of butter separates easily; if it splits, beat in a spoonful of the flour to bring it back.
- YieldEight to ten portions as the book says, though it keeps well wrapped for four or five days and improves after a day.
"Loaf cake" was the workaday name for a rich butter cake baked in a mould rather than as a flat sheet or in small tins. What dates it is the leavening: carbonate of potash, or pearlash, was potash leached from wood ash and was among the first chemical raising agents to reach domestic kitchens, in general use from the late eighteenth century until baking powder and bicarbonate of soda displaced it over the middle decades of the nineteenth. Cassell's, compiled in the 1870s and 80s, still lists it, which tells you how slowly older leaveners left the household repertoire. The rose-water is equally of its period: distilled flower waters were the standard sweet flavouring in English baking long before vanilla extract became cheap and reliable, and their retreat is one of the clearest markers between Victorian cake and ours. The costing in shillings and pence, and the note on how many it serves, were the dictionary's standard apparatus for a mistress planning a luncheon table.