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Saffron Cakes
Take a quartern of fine flour, and a pound and a half of butter, three ounces of caraway-seeds, six eggs well-beaten, a quarter of an ounce of well-pounded cloves and mace, a little pounded cinnamon, one pound of sugar, a little rose-water and saffron, a pint and a half of yeast, and a quart of milk. Mix these ingredients thus: first boil the milk and butter, then skim off the butter, and mix it with the flour and a little of the milk. Stir the yeast into the rest of the milk, and strain it. Mix it with the flour; add the eggs and spice, rose-water, tincture of saffron, sugar, and eggs. Beat all well up, and bake in a well-buttered pan, in a quick oven. Time to bake, an hour and a half.
This is a large yeast-raised enriched cake of the older English type, closer to a spiced bread than to a modern creamed sponge. The quantities are for a household batch and want scaling down before anything else.
- A quartern of flourIn baking usage a quartern is the quarter of a peck by weight, taken as about 3 1/2 to 4 lb of flour. The whole recipe therefore makes something in the region of 10 lb of dough; a quarter batch is a sensible modern size.
- The other unitsA pint and a half of yeast is British Imperial, about 850 ml; a quart of milk is about 1.1 litres. Scale the liquids with the flour.
- Yeast means barmThe pint and a half is liquid brewer's barm, skimmed off fermenting ale, and it is weaker and wetter than anything sold today. For 4 lb of flour, roughly 1 to 1 1/2 oz fresh yeast, or about one and a half to two sachets of instant dried, is the equivalent, with the milk made up to compensate for the lost liquid.
- Tincture of saffronSaffron steeped in spirit or rose-water to draw out the colour. Steeping a good pinch of threads in a few tablespoons of warm milk or rose-water for twenty minutes does the same job; add the liquid and the threads together.
- Boil the milk and butter, then skimThe instruction is not decoration. Scalding the milk was standard before pasteurisation and the melted butter is lifted off and worked into the flour first, so the fat coats the flour before the liquid arrives. Let the mixture cool to blood heat before the yeast goes anywhere near it.
- Eggs twiceThe eggs appear in both the mixing list and the additions; it is a printer's repetition, not two lots. Six eggs is the total.
- A quick ovenA quick oven is usually glossed as somewhere around 400-425F, which suits a bread but will scorch a cake this rich long before ninety minutes are up. Enriched sweet doughs of this size are better at 350F, and the stated hour and a half presumably applies to the full undivided batch.
- Caraway, not currantsThree ounces of caraway seed for the full batch is assertive by current taste, and caraway in sweet cake has largely fallen out of favour. Reduce it or leave it out; the saffron, mace and cloves carry the cake on their own.
- YieldThe full quantity is far too much for one or two tins and will need several large deep cake tins or loaf tins. A quarter batch gives one generous loaf-sized cake.
Saffron cake belongs to a family of enriched yeast doughs, coloured and perfumed with saffron, that survives most visibly in Cornwall, where saffron cake and saffron buns are still bakery staples. Saffron was grown in England from the later Middle Ages, most famously around the Essex town that took its name from the crop, Saffron Walden, though by the nineteenth century domestic cultivation had collapsed and the spice was imported. The claim that Cornish saffron use dates to Phoenician tin traders is traditional rather than documented. What places this version in its period is the barm and the caraway: before chemical raising agents were general, a festive cake was leavened with ale yeast and left to rise like bread, and caraway seed was a very common sweet-cake spice in English kitchens well into the nineteenth century.