Home › The Principles of Cookery › Seed Cakes, Superior
Seed Cakes, Superior
No. 1.--Beat half a pound of butter to cream. Work into it half a pound of powdered and sifted sugar, a pinch of salt, and, gradually, the well-beaten yolks of six eggs with the whites of four whisked till firm. Add three-quarters of a pound of dried and sifted flour, one ounce of caraway-seeds, and half a grated nutmeg. Put the mixture into a tin lined with buttered paper, and bake in a well-heated oven. Time to bake, about three-quarters of an hour. Sufficient for a moderate-sized cake. No. 2.--Beat half a pound of butter to cream. Shake half a pound of flour into it, and add a pinch of salt, six ounces of powdered sugar, half a grated nutmeg, and a tea-spoonful of caraway-seeds. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly. Whisk three eggs with a table-spoonful of brandy, and with this work the mixture to a smooth paste. Pour it into a well-buttered tin, and bake in a well-heated oven. Time to bake, one hour or more. No. 3.--Rub six ounces of butter to cream; add six ounces of good moist sugar, three-quarters of a pound of flour, a pinch of salt, and a small tea-spoonful of caraway-seeds. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly, and add three well-beaten eggs and as much milk as will make the mixture soft and smooth. Put it into a tin lined with buttered paper, and bake in a moderately-heated oven. Time to bake, about three-quarters of an hour. No. 4.--Beat three-quarters of a pound of butter to cream; add an equal weight of powdered and sifted sugar, and, very gradually, eight eggs, the whites and yolks having been whisked separately. Dredge in slowly three-quarters of a pound of dried flour, beat the mixture well, and work into it ten ounces of mixed candied peel finely shredded, two ounces of blanched sweet almonds chopped small, two table-spoonfuls of brandy, and two table-spoonfuls of rosewater. Line a baking-tin with buttered paper, and three-parts fill it with the mixture. Smooth the surface with a knife, and sprinkle comfits over the top. Bake in a moderately-heated oven. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour to one hour. Probable cost, 3s. No. 5.--Beat half a pound of fresh butter to cream, and mix with it very gradually a quarter of a pint of orange-flower or rose-water. Add a pound of powdered sugar, twelve ounces of dried flour, three ounces of ground rice, two ounces of sweet almonds, and two ounces of blanched and pounded bitter almonds, an ounce of caraway-seeds, and nine well-beaten eggs. The ingredients should be added slowly, and the mixture beaten between every addition. Line a buttered cake-tin with oiled or buttered paper, three-parts fill it with the mixture, and then bake in a well-heated oven. Time to bake, about an hour and a half. Probable cost of these cakes, from 10d. to 1s. 6d. per pound, according to the particular recipe followed.
Five Victorian pound-cake variants, ranging from a plain family cake to a rich fruited one. Four are workable with a few translations; the fifth is not, and the reason is worth reading before you start.
- No. 5 cannot be madeNo. 5 needs care -- It calls for two ounces of blanched and pounded bitter almonds. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are ground and wetted; two ounces is a large quantity of them, and baking cannot be relied on to remove the cyanide. Unprocessed bitter almonds are restricted or prohibited for sale as food in a number of countries, including the United States. Use one of the other four numbers, or a current recipe, and leave No. 5 alone.
- Oven heatsThe book gives no temperatures. "Well-heated" is usually read today as roughly 400-425F (200-220C) and "moderately-heated" as about 350F (180C). For a deep butter cake of this size, err towards the lower figure in both cases and shield the top with paper if it colours before the centre sets.
- No leavening, on purposeNone of these recipes uses baking powder. The lift comes from creaming the butter and from the beaten eggs -- in Nos. 1 and 4 the whites are whisked separately -- so the beating is the recipe. If the eggs are worked in carelessly the cake will be a dense biscuit-like slab rather than a light one.
- Caraway quantitiesNo. 1 and No. 5 want a full ounce of caraway seed, roughly four tablespoons, which gives an aggressively medicinal cake to modern palates. No. 2 and No. 3 use a teaspoonful. Start nearer the teaspoon unless you already know you like the older proportion.
- "Dried flour"Flour was warmed in front of the fire or in a cooling oven to drive off damp before sifting. Modern packaged flour needs nothing beyond sifting, though sifting still matters here since there is no chemical raising agent to break up lumps.
- Moist sugar and powdered sugar"Good moist sugar" in No. 3 is a soft light brown sugar, not white. "Powdered and sifted sugar" is not modern icing sugar but loaf sugar crushed fine — caster sugar is the right substitute throughout.
- ComfitsThe recipe says only "comfits": seeds or spices in a hard sugar shell, caraway being the commonest sort in this period, though No. 4 itself contains no caraway. Nonpareils or coarse sugar nibs give the same effect if you cannot find them.
- Tin and yield"A moderate-sized cake" is not defined by the book; a 7-8 inch round or a 2 lb loaf tin is a reasonable modern reading, lined with buttered paper as the book directs -- these are long bakes and the paper is what saves the crust. No. 4 comes to roughly four pounds of batter and will need a larger tin than the others.
- TestingThe stated times are for a coal range and should be treated as a lower bound. Judge by a skewer coming out clean from the centre and the cake shrinking slightly from the paper, not by the clock.
Seed cake was one of the fixtures of the English baking year, and caraway is the seed meant whenever an old recipe says simply "seeds". It was long associated with the end of spring sowing, and was traditionally said to be given to farm workers when the wheat was in the ground — a link recorded as early as Tusser's 'Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry' in 1573, which names the seed cake at the end of wheat sowing. Caraway comfits — the sugar-shelled seeds sprinkled over No. 4 — had been a fashionable sweetmeat since the sixteenth century and were also eaten after dinner as a digestive, which is part of why the seed found its way into cakes at all. Cassell's habit of numbering several versions of one cake, from a plain milk-and-butter mixture up to a brandy-and-rosewater cake, was aimed squarely at a household that might need either, and the price notes let a cook match the recipe to the occasion. The taste for caraway faded sharply in the twentieth century; the cake survives now mostly as a curiosity, which is a fair indication of how far one flavour can fall out of fashion.