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Railway Cake
1 pound Five Roses flour 6 ounces butter and lard mixed 6 ounces sugar 2 eggs ½ pint milk 1 teaspoon carbonate of soda 1 teaspoon cream of tartar 1 ounce caraway seeds 2 ounces candied peel.
This cake requires no beating.
Put into a quick oven at once, and bake 1 hour.
A plain rubbed-in seed cake from the era of homemade baking powder, weighed in pounds and ounces. The whole point of it is speed, so nothing here should be beaten or fussed over.
- The hinge: do not beat itThe soda and cream of tartar begin reacting the moment the milk goes in, and the batter is stiff enough that beating would toughen it. Rub the fat into the flour, stir in the liquid just until combined, and get it into the pan and the oven immediately.
- Weights to cups1 lb flour is about 3 1/2 to 4 cups, depending on how it is measured. 6 oz butter and lard mixed is 3/4 cup total, in whatever proportion you like; all butter works. 6 oz sugar is a scant cup of granulated.
- The half pint is ambiguousThis is a Canadian book, so ½ Imperial pint means 10 fl oz, or 1¼ cups. If you read it as a US half pint you get 1 cup. Start with 1 cup and add more only if the mixture is too dry to drop from the spoon.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon of each stands in for baking powder in the period manner, though the usual pairing was about twice as much cream of tartar as soda; treat it as roughly the lift of a couple of teaspoons of modern double-acting powder. Sift both thoroughly through the flour; a pocket of undissolved soda leaves a soapy yellow streak.
- Oven heatA quick oven is usually reckoned at about 400-425F, which suits a shallow cake but will set and scorch the crust of a one-pound-of-flour cake long before the middle cooks. Bake at 375F and check at 50 minutes with a skewer.
- Caraway is heavy-handed hereAn ounce of caraway seed is about 4 tablespoons, assertive even by seed-cake standards. Two tablespoons reads as a well-flavoured cake to most modern palates.
- Candied peel2 oz is about ⅓ cup chopped. Buy whole candied citron or orange peel and cut it yourself if you can; the pre-diced supermarket mix is mostly sugar and gives none of the bitter edge the cake wants.
- Pan and yieldThe batter fills a 9-inch round or one large loaf pan, greased and lined. It cuts into 10 to 12 slices and keeps four or five days wrapped.
Seed cake — plain, sturdy, flavoured with caraway and candied peel rather than fruit — was a fixture of British and Canadian home baking well into the twentieth century, and "railway cake" belongs to a small family of names given to cakes that could be mixed fast and carried; the usual explanation, that it was quick enough to make before the train and solid enough to survive the journey, is traditional rather than documented. The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its hard-wheat flour, and recipes like this one show what a home baker did before commercial baking powder had entirely displaced the older practice of pairing carbonate of soda with cream of tartar and relying on the cook to sift them evenly through the flour. Caraway's long dominance in plain cake faded through the twentieth century, though the reasons for that are less settled than a simple shift to cheap vanilla and citrus.