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Luncheon Cake, Plain
Mix two tea-spoonfuls of baking-powder and a pinch of salt with one pound of flour; rub in four ounces of good beef dripping, add a quarter of a pound of moist sugar, six ounces of currants, picked and stoned, half a nutmeg, grated, and a quarter of an ounce of caraway-seeds, if liked. Make the mixture up into a paste with two eggs and half a pint of milk, bake in a buttered tin in a moderate oven. This cake is better if left for a day before it is cut into. Time to bake, about an hour and a quarter. Probable cost, 9d.
A plain rubbed-in fruit cake of the kind kept in a tin for the middle of the day. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the quantities and terms need translating before you start.
- Weights and volumesOne pound of flour is about 450 g, or roughly 3 1/2 cups; four ounces of dripping is 115 g, sugar 115 g, currants 170 g. The half-pint of milk is an imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or 285 ml, not the American 8 oz.
- OvenA moderate oven is usually taken as about 325-350F (165-175C). At that heat an hour and a quarter suits a deep 8-inch round tin or a 2 lb loaf tin, though the recipe specifies only a buttered tin; test with a skewer from about an hour.
- Beef drippingThe fat rendered from roast beef, saved in a basin. It gives a savoury, faintly meaty depth that suits the caraway. Butter or lard in the same weight works if you have none, though the flavour is milder.
- Moist sugarVictorian moist sugar was a soft, damp, only partly refined sugar, brown in colour. Light soft brown sugar is the closest modern match; granulated white will make a paler, drier cake.
- "Picked and stoned"Currants have no stones. Picking meant removing stalks and grit from dried fruit that arrived far less clean than ours; a rinse and a good drying on a cloth is all a modern packet needs, if that.
- Raising powerTwo teaspoons of baking powder to a pound of flour is light by current standards, where three to four would be usual. Expect a close, firm crumb rather than a springy one temp that is the character of the cake, not a fault.
- CarawayA quarter ounce is about three teaspoons of seed, which is assertive. Half that will suit many modern palates, and the recipe already treats it as optional.
- Yield and keepingMakes one large cake, twelve to sixteen slices. The instruction to leave it a day is sound: the crumb settles and the nutmeg and caraway spread through it. Wrapped, it keeps the better part of a week.
Luncheon cake belongs to the Victorian habit of keeping a plain, undecorated fruit cake in the house to be cut for a midday meal, for callers, or for children home from school - something substantial enough to stand in for a course but not rich enough to count as a treat. The recipe gives the probable cost as ninepence, one of the costings the book supplies throughout so that a household could reckon what its kitchen was spending; ninepence for a cake of this size marks it as everyday economy. The use of beef dripping rather than butter points the same way: dripping was a by-product of the roasting joint, available to any household that roasted meat, and cookery writers of the period recommended it for plain cakes and pastry without apology. Caraway in a plain cake is older still, a survival of the seed cake long standard in English baking, here treated as an optional extra.