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SODA CAKES (another way)
Take six ounces of butter, and mix with it one pound of flour; work it into small crumbs. Mix with these half a pound of sugar, half a pint of boiling milk, three eggs, a little grated nutmeg, and eight ounces of currants. Beat the whole well and lightly together; then strew over it a very small tea-spoonful of finely-powdered carbonate of soda. Beat the cake again for three or four minutes, and then bake it from one hour to an hour and a half.
A plain Victorian currant cake leavened with soda rather than long beating. The original gives no oven heat and no tin size, so both need supplying.
- The hinge: order of mixingHalf a pint (about 10 fl oz) of boiling milk poured onto three whole eggs will curdle them on contact. Add the hot milk to the crumb-and-sugar mixture first, stir until it has dropped to blood heat, then beat in the eggs.
- Carbonate of sodaThis is baking soda. A "very small tea-spoonful" cannot be pinned down exactly; treat it as a scant teaspoon at most. Sift or crush it fine and disperse it, since undissolved lumps leave bitter yellow spots in the crumb.
- No acid in the batterSweet milk gives the soda little to react with, so the rise is modest and any excess soda tastes soapy. Sour milk or buttermilk in place of the sweet milk would supply the acid and give more lift, though the recipe as printed calls for milk boiled.
- Oven heatBake at 325-350F. A cake of this size and density wants the lower end for the full time; a skewer to the centre is the only reliable test.
- Tin and timingThe raw mixture comes to well over 3 lb, so it needs a lined 8-inch round tin about 3 inches deep, or more than one loaf tin. The longer end of the stated time suits the deep round cake.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Eight ounces is a generous quantity in this weight of batter; toss them in a little of the flour so they do not sink.
- Rubbing inSix ounces of butter to a pound of flour is a short-crust proportion. Keep the butter cool and rub only to breadcrumb size, as the original says, rather than creaming it.
- YieldAbout 3 lb of cake. It keeps several days wrapped and is better on the second day.
Soda cakes belong to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when cheap manufactured bicarbonate reached British kitchens and gave cooks an alternative to yeast-raised or laboriously beaten cakes. The "another way" in the title suggests more than one version of the same idea, this variant folding in currants and nutmeg to make what is essentially a plainer, quicker relation of a seed or currant cake. Chemical leavening of this kind was still transitional: baking powder, which pairs the soda with a dry acid so that sweet milk will do, is generally said to have become commercially available in Britain around the middle of the century, but recipes like this one, relying on soda alone, persisted in print for decades afterwards.