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Seed Cake, Rich
Take a pound and a quarter of flour, well dried, one pound of butter, one pound of pounded and sifted loaf sugar, eight eggs, and two ounces of caraway-seeds, one grated nutmeg, and its weight in cinnamon. Beat the butter to a cream, put in the sugar, beat the whites of the eggs and the yolks separately, then mix them with the butter and sugar. Beat in the flour, spice, and seed, a short time before placing it in the oven. Bake in a quick oven. Time, two hours to bake.
A pound cake in the strict sense — equal weights of butter, sugar and (near enough) flour, lifted only by eight eggs and hard beating. The instructions are sound; the oven direction is the part that will not survive translation.
- Ignore "quick oven" hereA quick oven is usually reckoned at around 400-425F, and a four-pound butter cake held there for two hours would colour hard outside long before the centre set. Bake at 325F and expect 1 hour 45 minutes to 2 hours, tenting with foil once the top has coloured.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold as a cone and broken up at home; pounding and sifting it produced what we buy as caster or superfine sugar. Use caster sugar — granulated is coarser and will cream less smoothly into the butter.
- The eggs are the whole leaveningThere is no baking powder in this cake; the lift comes from the creamed butter and the beaten eggs. The recipe has you beat whites and yolks separately before mixing them in; take the whites to soft peaks and fold rather than stir them in.
- "Beat in the flour... a short time before"The instruction means work the flour in briefly and get the cake into the oven at once, before the beaten whites deflate. Fold to just combined; extended beating after the flour goes in toughens the crumb.
- Two ounces of carawayThat is roughly half a cup of seed in a cake of this size, a genuinely assertive Victorian seed cake. One ounce gives a flavour most modern palates find balanced; keep the full two if you want the period effect.
- Nutmeg and its weight in cinnamonA whole nutmeg runs about 5-7 g, so this is roughly two teaspoons each of grated nutmeg and ground cinnamon.
- Drying the flourFlour was dried before the fire because it was stored in damp larders and clumped. Modern packaged flour needs nothing beyond sifting.
- Tin and yieldThe batter comes to about four pounds. Use a deep 9-inch round tin, lined on base and sides with a double thickness of parchment standing above the rim; it yields 16-20 slices. Test with a skewer at the centre, and cool in the tin — the cake is fragile while warm.
Seed cake is one of the older survivals in English baking: caraway comfits and caraway-strewn cakes appear in Tudor and Stuart household books, and the seed cake proper was long tied to the end of wheat sowing, when farm workers were traditionally given one — a link often repeated and generally traced to agricultural custom rather than to any documented single origin. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century the cake had settled into the standard English pound-cake formula, the "rich" version distinguished from the plain by its full pound of butter, eight eggs and heavy spicing rather than by any change in method. Its steady presence in Victorian cookery books says something about the era's tea table: a dense, keeping cake that could be made in quantity, sliced thin, and stay good in a tin for a week.