Home › The Principles of Cookery › SODA CAKE (another way)
SODA CAKE (another way)
Rub half a pound of fresh butter into a pound of flour; add a pinch of salt, half a pound of picked and dried currants, a quarter of a grated nutmeg, three ounces of finely-shredded candied peel (lemon, orange, or citron), and two well-beaten eggs. Dissolve a small tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda in the third of a pint of lukewarm milk. Beat the ingredients well together, and bake the cake as quickly as possible after the soda is put in. Turn the dough into a buttered tin, and bake in a moderate oven. Time to bake, about an hour and three-quarters. Probable cost, 9d. per pound.
A plain fruited cake of the pre-baking-powder kind: everything is measured by the pound, and the whole thing hinges on getting it into the oven before the soda has spent itself. A few of the quantities and terms need translating.
- The hinge: work fast once the soda goes inCarbonate of soda begins releasing gas the moment it meets liquid. Have the tin buttered and the oven fully up to heat before you dissolve it, and put the cake in immediately after the final beating.
- Carbonate of sodaThis is ordinary bicarbonate of soda (baking soda), not baking powder. A "small teaspoonful" is on the order of 3-4 g.
- Soda with no acidSweet milk gives soda almost nothing to react with, so the rise here is modest and you may taste a faint soapy edge. Sour milk or buttermilk appears in many period soda cakes, which would supply the missing acid.
- A third of a pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is about 6 2/3 fl oz - a generous 3/4 US cup, or 190 ml.
- No sugarThe recipe as printed contains none. The sweetness comes entirely from the half pound of currants and three ounces of candied peel, which makes this closer to a rich soda bread than to a modern fruit cake. That is not an omission in the text; it is what the cake was.
- Moderate ovenRead as 325-350F (160-175C). At the lower end of that range the long stated time makes sense for a cake of nearly three pounds; check the centre with a skewer from about 1 1/4 hours.
- Candied peelBuy whole candied peel and shred it yourself if you can. The pre-diced supermarket kind is drier and more sugary, and three ounces of it will read sweeter than intended.
- "Picked and dried" currantsNineteenth-century dried fruit arrived gritty and full of stalks, so it was picked over and rubbed in a cloth with a little flour. Modern currants need only a rinse and a thorough drying, or they will sink.
- Tin and yieldClose to 3 lb of batter: an 8-9 inch round tin, buttered and lined. Keeps several days wrapped.
Soda cakes belong to the period between the old reliance on yeast or many beaten eggs and the general adoption of commercial baking powder in the second half of the nineteenth century. Bicarbonate of soda - sold in kitchens as "carbonate of soda" - gave the household baker a cheap, instant lift, and Cassell's, a book pitched squarely at the economical middle-class kitchen, prints several versions of the same idea. The costing seems to tell you the intent: ninepence a pound, if that is the right reckoning, was a modest sum for a fruited cake, and the recipe achieves it by leaning on currants and peel rather than sugar and by using only two eggs where a pound cake of the same size would have wanted six or eight. The insistence on baking "as quickly as possible after the soda is put in" is the honest signature of the chemical era: cooks had learned the hard way that the gas would not wait.