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Seed Cakes, Cheap
No. 1.--Rub six ounces of sweet dripping into a pound of flour, add a pinch of salt, a tea-spoonful of mixed spice, a table-spoonful of caraway-seeds, and six ounces of sugar. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly. Put a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda into half a pint of milk, and set it in the oven till the soda is dissolved. Let the milk cool a little, and when it is lukewarm add a tea-spoonful of vinegar, and stir it into the cake. Beat the cake well, put it into a buttered hoop, and bake in a moderately-heated oven. Time to bake, one hour. Probable cost, 4d. per pound. Sufficient for a moderate-sized cake. No. 2.--Rub a quarter of a pound of butter into three pounds of flour; add half a tea-spoonful of salt, three heaped tea-spoonfuls of baking-powder, two tea-spoonfuls of mixed spice, two ounces of caraway-seeds, a pinch of powdered mace or grated nutmeg, eight ounces of sugar, and two ounces of candied peel chopped small. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly. Beat them to a paste with a pint of milk, and bake in a well-heated oven. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour to one hour. Probable cost, 5d. per pound. Sufficient for two moderate-sized cakes. No. 3.--Rub six ounces of butter into a pound of flour, add a pinch of salt, six ounces of moist sugar, and two table-spoonfuls of caraway-seeds. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly. Dissolve a small dessert-spoonful of carbonate of soda in a table-spoonful of milk. Add this to as much milk as will make up half a pint altogether, stir the milk to two well-beaten eggs, and afterwards beat the whole into the cake. Put the mixture into a buttered tin, and bake in a moderately-heated oven. A little spice and candied peel can be added, if approved. Time to bake, one hour. Probable cost, 8d. per pound. Sufficient for a moderate-sized cake. No. 4.--Rub six ounces of butter into three-quarters of a pound of flour, add a pinch of salt, five ounces of the best moist sugar, and a dessert-spoonful of caraway-seeds. Dissolve half a small tea-spoonful of soda in a tea-spoonful of hot milk. Beat this up with two eggs already well whisked, and stir the whole into the cake. Put the mixture into a buttered tin, and bake in a moderately-heated oven till the cake is done. Time to bake, from thirty to forty minutes. Probable cost, 9d. per pound.
Four versions of the same cake, arranged from cheapest to most expensive: No. 1 leans on dripping and soda, No. 4 on butter and eggs. All four are plain, dense, sturdy cakes meant to be cut in slabs, not layered or iced.
- Oven temperatures"Moderately-heated" is usually read today as around 350F (175C), and the "well-heated" oven of No. 2 as around 400F (200C), though the book gives no figures. Given the density of these batters, the lower reading is the safer choice for all four.
- Sweet drippingClarified beef or pork fat, skimmed and rendered until it has no meat flavour, hence "sweet" (meaning fresh, not sugared). Modern beef dripping sold in blocks works, as does lard; both give a firmer, shorter crumb than butter. Ordinary shortening is the neutral substitute.
- Moist sugarUnrefined soft sugar, damp enough to clump. Light brown soft sugar is the direct equivalent; caster sugar will work but the cake loses some of its faint molasses note.
- Carbonate of soda in the ovenCarbonate of soda -- Warming the milk in the oven was presumably a way of getting a coarse powder into solution. Modern bicarbonate dissolves in cold milk with stirring, so the warming in No. 1 (and the hot milk of No. 4) can be skipped -- and note that once the vinegar goes into No. 1, the batter must reach the oven promptly.
- Baking powder in No. 2Three heaped teaspoons to three pounds of flour is well under modern practice, which runs to about a teaspoon per cup (roughly 4 oz) of flour. Expect a close, biscuity crumb rather than a light one; by that rule three pounds of flour would take something closer to twelve level teaspoons.
- The hoopA bottomless metal ring set on a baking sheet, usually lined with paper. A greased 8-inch springform or deep round tin does the same job for the 1 lb flour recipes; No. 2 makes half as much batter again per cake, so it needs two larger or deeper tins.
- No. 4 is short of liquidThree-quarters of a pound of flour against two eggs and a teaspoon of milk gives a stiff paste, not a batter. Either the original omitted a quantity of milk or the cake was meant to be pressed into the tin like a thick shortbread. Add milk cautiously — a few tablespoons — until the mixture drops heavily from the spoon.
- Caraway quantityTwo tablespoons to a pound of flour (No. 3) is assertive by current taste. A single tablespoon per pound reads as flavour rather than as ballast; toast the seeds briefly in a dry pan first to loosen the aroma.
- Mixed spiceThe British blend of cinnamon, coriander, nutmeg, ginger, cloves and allspice — not American pumpkin pie spice, though that is close enough. Not to be confused with mixed whole spice for pickling.
- Yield and testingEach 1 lb flour version gives a cake of roughly 2 lb, cutting into 10 to 12 slices. Test with a skewer at 45 minutes rather than trusting the full hour, since these batters brown before the centre sets.
Seed cake — flour, sugar, fat and caraway — was one of the oldest and most persistent plain cakes in the British repertoire, traditionally said to be associated with the end of spring sowing and, by the nineteenth century, with tea, funerals and anything else requiring a keeping cake that cost little. What makes this entry a period document is the word cheap and the costings attached to each version: 4d., 5d., 8d., 9d. per pound, a ladder of respectability from dripping-and-soda up to butter-and-eggs, with the household choosing its rung. Cassell's was written for readers who cared about the difference. The soda-and-vinegar trick in No. 1 is also telling: chemical raising was increasingly used in economical baking, though beaten eggs still do the work in Nos. 3 and 4, and a cook could produce a passable cake without either. Caraway itself fell out of English favour in the twentieth century, which is why a cake that every Victorian recognised now tastes distinctly foreign to many palates.