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WHITE CAKES (simple method)
Rub an ounce of butter into half a pound of dried and sifted flour. Add a small pinch of salt, four table-spoonfuls of powdered white sugar, half a tea-spoonful of caraway-seeds, one egg, and as much milk as will make a smooth light paste. Roll it out a quarter of an inch thick, cut it into shapes, and bake these on baking-tins in a quick oven. Time to bake the cakes, ten to fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 4d. for this quantity.
A plain rolled biscuit with very little fat and no chemical raising, so texture depends entirely on not overworking the paste and not overbaking it.
- WeightsHalf a pound of flour is 225 g, roughly 1¾ cups scooped and levelled. An ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons — a genuinely lean dough, closer to a tea biscuit than a modern cookie.
- "Powdered" sugarIn Victorian usage this means granulated sugar ground fine, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Caster sugar is the correct substitute; four tablespoons is about 50 g.
- "Dried and sifted" flourPeriod cookery books commonly direct that flour be warmed and dried before baking to drive off damp. Modern packaged flour needs no drying; sift it and move on.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature; "quick oven" is conventionally read as somewhere in the region of 400-450F. At a quarter-inch thick these will colour fast, so start checking well before the stated ten to fifteen minutes.
- The hingeAdd the milk a spoonful at a time and stop the moment the paste coheres. With no raising agent, all the lightness comes from the egg and from minimal handling; a wet or kneaded dough bakes into a hard, glassy biscuit.
- CarawayHalf a teaspoon in this quantity is restrained by period standards. Crush the seeds lightly between the fingers before adding to release the oil, or leave them whole if you prefer the flavour to arrive in bursts.
- YieldDepends on the cutter; at two inches across this quantity will give a couple of dozen or more. They keep for several days in a tin.
Caraway-seeded cakes and biscuits run right through British baking from the sixteenth century onward, from grand yeast-risen seed cakes down to cheap flat cakes like this one; the seed was cheap, kept indefinitely, and was widely held to aid digestion, which is part of why it clung to tea-table baking long after other spices moved on. The costing of fourpence, quoted as a matter of course, is characteristic of the late-Victorian household dictionary, which assumed a mistress checking the kitchen accounts as closely as the results.