Home › The Principles of Cookery › Loaf Cake
Loaf Cake
Mix one pound and a half of flour with three-quarters of a pound of moist sugar; add an ounce of caraway-seeds, and eight well-beaten eggs. Mix thoroughly one table-spoonful of yeast, a table-spoonful of milk, and a table-spoonful of water and stir these into the cake. Put the mixture on one side a little time, and when it is risen mould it lightly; put it into a well-buttered tin, and bake in a moderate oven for about two hours. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
A yeast-raised seed cake of the older sort — closer to an enriched bread dough than to a creamed sponge, which is why the instruction is to mould it rather than pour it.
- It contains no fatThere is no butter in the mixture, only the buttered tin. That is not an omission: this is a lean, eggy, sweetened dough, and it will bake up firm and bready rather than tender. With no fat to keep it soft it is likely to stale faster than a creamed cake.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined soft sugar, damp and pale brown. Light brown or golden caster sugar is the nearest modern equivalent; white granulated will work but gives a flatter flavour.
- The yeast is the ambiguous measureA tablespoon of Victorian yeast most likely meant liquid barm from a brewer, of unpredictable strength, and it is not directly convertible to modern dried or fresh yeast. For 1.5 lb of flour a modern baker would reach for something in the region of 7 g instant yeast, but the original quantity cannot be translated with confidence.
- A tablespoon of liquid is not muchWith eight eggs supplying most of the moisture, the milk and water are there mainly to slacken and wake the yeast. Mix the yeast into the warmed milk and water first and let it froth before it goes near the flour.
- "Put on one side a little time"This means a proper rise, not ten minutes. An egg-rich, sugar-heavy dough with no fat rises slowly; expect something in the region of one to two hours at warm room temperature, until visibly puffed, then shape and bake as directed.
- Oven and tinA moderate oven is usually taken as around 350F / 180C. The quantity would suit a large deep cake tin of about 9 inches, or two 2 lb loaf tins. Two hours is as the recipe directs for one big tin; smaller loaf tins would need considerably less, and a skewer should come out clean.
- CarawayAn ounce is roughly 4 tablespoons of seed — assertive by modern taste. Half that gives a seed cake most people will finish. Warming the seeds briefly in a dry pan sharpens the flavour.
- Cost and yield"1s." is one shilling, the whole-cake cost when the book was written. Eight to ten portions is realistic for a cake this size and this dense.
Seed cake — plain cake perfumed with caraway — was one of the fixtures of the British tea table for several centuries, and this version preserves the older, yeast-leavened method that chemical raising agents were steadily displacing through the nineteenth century. Before baking powder became cheap and reliable, a "loaf cake" was exactly that: a sweetened, spiced dough set to rise with barm begged or bought from a brewer, kneaded, and baked in a tin, sitting somewhere between bread and cake. Caraway itself was, by custom at least, associated with the completion of the spring sowing and with seed-time feasts, and the seeds were also chewed as a digestive, which is part of why they turn up so persistently in cakes and comfits. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households in the later 1800s, prints such recipes alongside newer creamed-butter cakes, and the two methods sit side by side in the same book — a fair picture of a kitchen in transition.