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YORKSHIRE FLAT CAKE (sometimes called Oven Cake)
When bread is made at home, and the dough is being formed into loaves, take a piece the size of half a loaf. Form it into a ball, and with the rolling-pin roll it into a large round cake, from eight to twelve inches in diameter and three-quarters of an inch thick. Put it on a buttered baking-tin, prick it with a fork, let it rise before the fire for about ten minutes, and bake in a brisk oven. When firm, it is done enough. Split it in halves, butter it well, and serve hot or cold. Time to bake the cake, about three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 2d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A piece of ordinary bread dough flattened and baked quickly — the ancestor of what Yorkshire bakers still sell as oven-bottom cakes. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the instructions need translating.
- How much dough"Half a loaf" is imprecise: household loaves of the period ranged from about a pound to the 4 lb quartern, so the piece intended could be anything from half a pound to two, and a round at the twelve-inch end of the range will take a good deal more than a pound. Any plain white bread dough works; a lean, slightly stiff dough holds the round shape better than a soft enriched one.
- A brisk ovenBrisk means hot; in modern terms roughly 425-450F (220-230C), though the recipe itself gives no temperature. Preheat properly and put the tin in near the top of the oven.
- Ignore the three-quarters of an hourA round of dough three-quarters of an inch thick is baked through in 15-20 minutes at that heat, and will be dry and hard at forty-five. The real instruction is the one before it — "when firm, it is done enough." Tap the base; a hollow sound and pale gold colour mean it is ready.
- Why you prick itThe fork holes keep the cake flat by letting steam escape instead of inflating it into a pocket like pitta. Prick right through to the tin, and prick again if it starts to dome in the oven.
- The ten-minute riseBefore the fire means somewhere warm. Ten minutes is a very short proof, and longer proving will give you something closer to a flat loaf.
- Splitting and butteringSplit it horizontally while still hot so the butter melts into both cut faces, then close it again. Cut into wedges to serve; the stated three or four persons is realistic for a twelve-inch cake as a tea-time bread.
- Probable cost, 2dTwopence is a very low figure, presumably because the dough came out of a batch already being made; the recipe is an exercise in thrift.
Flat cakes of this kind belong to the era when bread was baked at home in weekly batches, and a pinched-off piece of dough was the natural way to get something edible out of the oven at once rather than waiting hours for loaves to cool. In Yorkshire and Lancashire the form survives commercially as oven-bottom cakes or oven-bottom muffins, so named because they were baked directly on the floor of the brick oven, and they are still split and buttered or filled much as Cassell's directs. The alternative name given here, "Oven Cake", points to its other traditional use: bakers are often said to have used a quick-baking flat round to judge whether the oven had come to heat, since it browned in minutes and told you what the loaves would do.