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Tunbridge Cakes
Rub two ounces of fresh butter into half a pound of dried and sifted flour. Add a pinch of salt, four ounces of powdered white sugar, two ounces of caraway-seeds, and as much water as will be required to make a stiff paste. Roll this out very thin, stamp it into small rounds, prick the surface lightly with a fork, and bake the cakes in a well-heated oven. Time to bake, fifteen to thirty minutes, according to size. Probable cost, 6d. for this quantity. TUNBRIDGE PUDDINGS. Boil a pint of new milk, and as it rises in the pan stir into it gradually as much flour as will make a thick batter. Beat it until quite smooth, pour it out, and when cold add three well-beaten eggs, a table-spoonful of sugar, and two or three drops of almond ratafia or any other flavouring. Throw the butter in spoonfuls on a large floured plate, dredge the surface well with flour, and drop the puddings into hot lard or clarified fat. Fry them till they are lightly and equally browned, and serve on a hot dish with white sugar sifted thickly over them. Time to fry, until brown. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
TUNNY. Tunny is a kind of fish slightly resembling the mackerel; it is caught in the Mediterranean, and sent to other parts preserved in oil. The fish is delicate and highly esteemed, somewhat resembling veal. To serve it, cut it in thin slices, and arrange these in rows overlapping each other. Put little heaps of capers and chopped parsley round the dish, pour a little fresh salad-oil over the fish, and serve.
Two recipes and a fish note run together, as Cassell's entries often do. The cakes are the substance of the page; the puddings are a fried batter fritter, and the tunny paragraph is a serving suggestion rather than a recipe.
- Weights in cupsHalf a pound of flour is about 1¾ cups (225 g); two ounces of butter is half a stick (55 g); four ounces of sugar is about half a cup (115 g). The water is deliberately unspecified — add it a spoonful at a time until the paste just coheres, since a wet dough will not roll thin enough.
- The caraway is the thing to reconsiderTwo ounces is roughly half a cup of seed, about eight tablespoons, against half a pound of flour, which gives a cake that is more caraway than biscuit. Period recipes of this sort do call for caraway on this scale; one to two tablespoons reads as generous today.
- "Well-heated oven"Unquantified; for a thin sugar biscuit read it as a fairly hot oven, roughly 375–400F (190–200C). The recipe allows fifteen to thirty minutes according to size, but rolled genuinely thin these are likely to colour well before that, so watch them and pull them before the edges darken.
- Roll thinner than feels rightThe recipe says "very thin", close to a wafer; aim for 2–3 mm. The fork pricking is not only decoration: it helps stop the paste blistering and lifting off the tray.
- "Dried and sifted flour"Flour was routinely warmed and dried before the fire to drive off damp from a cold larder. Modern packaged flour needs only sifting, and the water quantity assumes dry flour, so start low.
- A likely misprint in the puddings"Throw the butter in spoonfuls on a large floured plate" should almost certainly read batter — the plate of flour is there to coat the soft spoonfuls so they hold shape as they meet the fat.
- Almond ratafiaA sweetened almond-flavoured cordial, largely gone from shops. A few drops of almond extract stand in, and the quantity should stay at drops rather than teaspoons.
- Frying temperature"Until brown" assumes a cook watching the pan. Hot lard or clarified fat at 350–360F (175–180C) browns the fritters in three to four minutes; cooler fat leaves them greasy and the interior batter raw.
- YieldThe cakes give roughly two to three dozen small rounds. The puddings are stated as sufficient for five or six.
Tunbridge cakes take their name from Tunbridge Wells in Kent, the chalybeate spa that drew fashionable visitors from the seventeenth century onward, and they belong to the English tradition of biscuits named for a town — as with Bath Olivers, Grantham gingerbreads and Shrewsbury cakes, though of those only Bath was a spa. Caraway was a standard flavouring of English seed cakes and biscuits from the Tudor period until well into the nineteenth century, and the heavy hand here is not eccentric. Cassell's habit of giving a "probable cost" — sixpence for this quantity — marks the book as a household manual for the late-Victorian middle class, written for a mistress budgeting a kitchen as much as for the cook working in it. The tunny paragraph tacked on the end reflects the fact that the fish reached Britain preserved in oil, as the entry itself says, and was treated as something to be sliced and dressed rather than cooked.