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Milk Breakfast Cakes
A batter of flour, milk, and yeast should be made overnight for these cakes. Half a pint of yeast and a quart of milk made warm will moisten half a dozen pounds of flour. When risen next morning (the batter should be covered and set by the fireplace during the night), beat into it four or five ounces of butter melted, knead and make into small cakes, using as much flour as will be necessary to prevent the dough sticking to the fingers. Put the cakes as they are made on a baking-tin before the fire, while the oven is getting the required heat, then bake; they will take about twenty minutes in a hot oven. Send them to table quickly, well buttered and hot. Probable cost, 2s.
A Victorian overnight yeast batter scaled for a large household. The quantities are enormous by modern standards and the liquid-to-flour ratio needs attention before you start.
- Scale it down firstSix pounds of flour yields something like two to three dozen cakes. A quarter of the recipe — 1 1/2 lb flour, about 1 cup milk plus more as needed, 1 oz butter — is a sensible domestic batch.
- The liquid is short as writtenThe dough is dry as written -- a quart of milk plus the half pint of barm gives roughly 50 fl oz of liquid to six pounds of flour, which makes a stiff dough rather than a batter. If it feels too tight when you knead in the butter, work in a little more warm milk.
- Half a pint of yeastThis means liquid brewer's barm from a brewery or a previous baking, not dried yeast. For the quarter batch use about 1 1/2 teaspoons instant or 2 teaspoons active dry yeast, dissolved in the warm milk.
- "Warm" milkRoughly blood heat, judged by hand. Milk much above about 120F begins to harm the yeast, and hot milk will kill it.
- Overnight by the fireplaceThe dying fire gave gentle warmth for a long slow rise. A modern kitchen counter is close enough, or the refrigerator overnight if your room runs warm; the cold sponge will need an hour to wake up in the morning.
- Proving in front of the fireThe shaped cakes rest on the tin near the hearth while the oven comes up to heat. Give them 20-30 minutes in a warm spot until visibly puffed, and do not skip this step: they go into the oven under-risen otherwise.
- A hot ovenConventionally around 425-450F. Twenty minutes, as the recipe says, suits small cakes; check that they sound hollow.
- ServingButter them and send them to table hot, as directed. Enriched yeast cakes of this kind go stale within hours.
Cassell's places this among its plainest breakfast breads: a slack overnight yeast sponge, enriched with a little melted butter and baked in small rounds, bearing a family resemblance to the muffin, the Sally Lunn and the various regional "breakfast cakes" that filled British tea tables before chemical raising agents took over. The give-away detail is the yeast measured by the half-pint: a baker was, by tradition, a common household source of liquid barm, and its strength varied enough that recipes leaned on overnight fermentation to make up for uncertainty. The scale, six pounds of flour at a stroke, reflects a book written for cooks feeding a large family and its servants, and the "probable cost, 2s." is Cassell's characteristic costing note, meant to let a housekeeper check her accounts as much as her baking.