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Yorkshire Thin Cakes
½ pound light bread dough ½ pound Five Roses flour ½ pound pure lard, or butter, or both mixed.
Knead well, and let stand an hour or two. Roll out, and cut into shapes with biscuit cutter or empty baking powder tin.
The above makes an excellent crust for tarts, mince pies, etc., and is always fresh as if newly baked after being put into a hot oven for a few minutes.
A hybrid of bread dough and pastry: the yeast in the borrowed dough does the lifting while the fat, worked in cold, makes flakes. The proportions are the whole point, so weigh rather than scoop.
- Weights in modern terms½ lb bread dough is about 8 oz of risen white dough, roughly a quarter of a standard 2 lb loaf batch. ½ lb flour is about 1¾ to 2 cups, and ½ lb lard or butter is 1 cup — equal weights of added flour and fat, though the bread dough brings more flour with it, so the overall fat-to-flour ratio is lower than 1:1.
- The hinge: keep the fat cold and lumpyThe fat -- the recipe says only 'knead well' and gives no instruction about the temperature of the fat. Keeping it cold and not fully blended is a modern inference aimed at flakiness rather than anything the text specifies; work quickly, and chill during the rest if your kitchen is warm.
- The rest is not a proofThe rest -- the recipe does not say what the hour or two is for. Some rise should be expected, since the borrowed dough carries live yeast, though the added flour and fat dilute it; a cool spot also keeps the fat firm.
- Lard versus butterLard is generally reckoned to give the flakier result; butter gives flavour but contains water, which makes a softer dough. The recipe allows 'both mixed' without giving proportions. Modern shelf-stable shortening behaves differently and will not brown the same way.
- Cutter sizeBaking powder tins came in several sizes, commonly somewhere around 2 to 3 inches across. Roll the dough to roughly ¼ inch for cakes to eat on their own, thinner if lining tart tins.
- Oven and timingNo temperature or time is given. A 'hot oven' in period usage is usually taken as somewhere around 425–450F; at that heat thin cakes take roughly 12–15 minutes, until well risen and lightly coloured. Watch them, as the high fat content browns fast.
- As a tart crustUsed for mince pies or tarts it does not need blind baking, but it puffs, so dock the base or weight it if you want a flat bed for filling.
- Yield and reheatingYield depends on how thin the dough is rolled; the recipe gives no count. On the recipe's own account, a few minutes in a hot oven re-melts the fat and revives day-old cakes.
"Thin cake" is a northern English name — often associated with Yorkshire and the north-east more generally — for a flat, fat-enriched bread baked quickly and eaten split and buttered, part of the same family as lardy cake and the griddle-baked singin' hinnies. Recipes of this kind assume a household that already had bread dough rising in a crock, which is why the first ingredient is simply half a pound of it: nothing was mixed specially. Its appearance in the Five Roses Cook Book, published by Canada's Lake of the Woods Milling Company in the early twentieth century, reflects how such collections gathered contributions from settler kitchens and filed them by function rather than by origin — here a Yorkshire tea bread recast as a general-purpose crust for tarts and mince pies.