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Luncheon Cake
Any good plain cake may be used as a luncheon cake, nevertheless recipes are here given for two or three. Rub half a pound of fresh butter into three-quarters of a pound of fine flour; add a quarter of a pound of ground rice, a pinch of salt, half a pound of moist sugar, four ounces of currants, picked and washed, half an ounce of caraway-seeds, if liked, half a nutmeg, grated, and an ounce of candied lemon cut into thin slices. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly. Dissolve a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda in half a pint of boiling milk. Let it cool, then stir into it three eggs well beaten. Moisten the cake with the liquid, and be careful to mix all very thoroughly. Butter a tin, and line the sides with buttered paper. Put in the cake, and bake in a moderate oven. In order to ascertain when the cake is done, push a skewer to the bottom of it, and when it comes out clear and dry the cake is done enough. Let it stand entire for two days before cutting. Time to bake, an hour and a quarter. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A rubbed-in fruit cake of the plain Victorian type: no creaming, no long beating, and a large amount of liquid carried in by boiling milk. Two details decide whether it works — letting the milk cool before the eggs go in, and mixing fast once the liquid is added.
- Cool the milk firstHalf a pint of boiling milk poured over three beaten eggs will curdle them into threads. Let the soda-and-milk mixture come down to lukewarm, then whisk the eggs in; the soda is already dissolved and loses nothing by waiting.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint here is an Imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or about 1¼ US cups — roughly a fifth more liquid than a US half-pint. The weights are straightforward: 8 oz butter, 12 oz flour, 4 oz ground rice, 8 oz sugar, 4 oz currants.
- Moist sugar"Moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined soft sugar, closest today to light brown muscovado. It brings colour and, in unrefined form, a slight acidity for the carbonate of soda to act on; there is little else acid in the mixture.
- Ground riceMilled rice, not cooked rice; it is usually a little coarser than modern rice flour, which is part of the short, slightly sandy crumb that distinguishes these cakes from a plain sponge. Substituting more wheat flour is likely to toughen the texture.
- OvenA moderate oven is conventionally taken as around 350F (175C), though a cake this rich and this deep may do better nearer 325F (165C) for the stated hour and a quarter, with the skewer test to confirm. Loosely cover the top with foil if it colours before the centre sets.
- The tinButter and line a deep 8-inch round tin, paper up the sides as the recipe says — this batter is heavy and takes a long bake, and the paper collar prevents a hard edge.
- Candied lemonAn ounce of candied lemon peel, sliced thin rather than chopped fine, so it reads as ribbons through the crumb. Modern mixed peel works but is sweeter and less aromatic.
- RestingThe two days standing whole is not ceremony. A soda-raised, sugar-heavy cake is crumbly and tastes flatly of soda straight from the tin; wrapped and left, the moisture evens out and the spice comes forward.
- YieldThe ingredients come to well over 3 lb before baking, so expect a finished cake of roughly 3 lb, cutting into 12 to 16 slices. It should keep a week in a tin.
"Luncheon cake" describes an occasion rather than a formula, which is why the recipe opens by admitting that any good plain cake will do. By the later nineteenth century luncheon was generally a light midday meal, and it called for something less grand than a rich iced cake and less breakfast-like than a bun: a keeping cake, left to mature and sliced plain. The ground rice and the carbonate of soda both suit the period: rice flour was commonly used in British baking to shorten a crumb cheaply, and chemical raising by carbonate of soda was by then widespread in cakes of this class. The caraway seeds, offered here as optional, recall the older seed cake, a flavour that has since largely fallen out of British home baking. The costing of 1s 6d suggests an everyday household cake rather than a special-occasion one.