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Milk-And-Butter Cakes
Take three-quarters of a pound of flour, half a pound of butter, half a pound of sugar, and one tea-spoonful of grated nutmeg. Cut up the butter in the flour; add the sugar and spices by degrees. Stir in as much milk as will make a dough. Knead it well, roll it out in sheets, cut in cakes, butter your tins, lay the cakes on so as not to touch, and bake in a moderate oven.
A plain rolled sugar biscuit of the older English type, leavened by nothing but the steam from the butter and milk. The proportions are generous with fat and sugar, so the dough behaves more like shortbread than a scone.
- The hinge: keep it cold and handle it briefly"Knead it well" may reflect an aim for a stiffer, closer-textured cake than we would want. Work the butter into the flour until it resembles coarse crumbs, add just enough milk to bring it together, and stop. Warm, overworked dough spreads and toughens.
- Weights in modern termsThree-quarters of a pound of flour is about 340 g, or roughly 2 3/4 cups; half a pound each of butter and sugar is 225 g, being two US sticks and about 1 1/8 cups respectively. The milk is deliberately unmeasured -- with this much butter only a few tablespoons will be needed.
- "A moderate oven"Roughly 350-375F (175-190C). At that heat, cakes rolled about 1/4 inch thick should take somewhere near 12 to 15 minutes and be barely coloured at the edges; they firm as they cool.
- No raising agentThere is no saleratus, baking powder or egg here, which is intentional. If you add a teaspoon of baking powder you will get a softer, more scone-like cake, but not the dense biscuit the recipe describes.
- "Add the sugar and spices"The ingredient list names only nutmeg, so "spices" is a stock phrase rather than an instruction for more. A teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg in this quantity of dough is assertive but correct for the period.
- Buttering the tinsBaking parchment does the job better and prevents the sugary undersides from catching. "So as not to touch" still applies — these spread a little.
- YieldAbout 30 cakes at 2 1/2 inches across. They keep a week in a tin and, like most all-butter biscuits, improve on the second day.
Milk-and-butter cakes belong to the large family of plain tea cakes that filled Victorian household manuals: flour, butter, sugar, a liquid to bind, and whatever spice the store cupboard held. Such recipes were teaching examples as much as recipes — the rubbing-in method demonstrated here underlies shortcrust pastry, scones and shortbread alike, and a cook who could judge "as much milk as will make a dough" by feel had learned something transferable. Nutmeg was the default sweet spice of British baking well into the nineteenth century, sold whole and grated at home for its aroma, which is why so many recipes of the period specify it grated.