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To make a rich seed cake
Take a pound and a quarter of flour well dried, a pound of butter, a pound of loaf sugar, beat and sifted, eight eggs and two ounces of caraway seed, one grated nufmeg, and its weight in cinnamon. Beat the butter into a cream, put in the sugar, beat the whites of the eggs and the yolks separately, them mix them with the butter and sugar. Beat in the flour, spices and seed, a little before sending it away. Bake it two hours in a quick oven.
A true pound cake in the original sense: equal weights of butter, sugar and eggs, with a little extra flour, and no chemical leavening at all. Everything depends on the air you beat in.
- The hinge: aerationThere is no baking powder or soda here, so the only lift comes from creaming the butter and sugar thoroughly and folding in separately whipped whites. Cream until visibly pale and light, whip the whites to soft peaks, and fold the flour in by hand at the end rather than beating it.
- "A quick oven" for two hoursA quick oven is usually glossed as somewhere around 400-425F, but that reading belongs to a brick oven whose heat falls steadily through the bake. A cake of this weight held that hot for two hours would be burnt outside and raw within. Treat it as a heavy pound cake: 325F, and start checking at 90 minutes with a skewer.
- Weights, not cupsUse a scale. 1 lb 4 oz flour is about 4 1/2 cups, 1 lb butter is four sticks, 1 lb sugar about 2 1/4 cups.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar came as a hard cone that was broken up, pounded and sifted before use. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute; caster sugar creams faster if you have it.
- "Flour well dried"Flour was dried before the fire to drive off damp from the sack. Modern bagged flour is already dry and needs nothing done to it.
- Two ounces of carawayThat is roughly 1/2 cup of seed, an assertive amount by current taste and the whole point of a seed cake. Half that quantity gives a cake most people will finish; less than an ounce and you may as well leave it out.
- Nutmeg and its weight in cinnamonOne whole nutmeg grates to about 2 to 3 teaspoons and weighs only a few grams, so the matching cinnamon works out at roughly 2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon.
- "A little before sending it away"Households often sent cakes to a baker's oven or a communal bakehouse. The instruction means add flour, spice and seed at the last moment so the batter goes into heat while it is still aerated.
- Pan and yieldThe batter runs to about 4 1/2 lb. Bake it in a buttered and lined 10-inch tube pan or two 9-by-5 loaf tins, and expect 16 to 20 slices. It keeps well wrapped for a week and slices better on the second day.
Seed cake is one of the oldest surviving English cake types, and the seed in question is usually caraway. It was long associated with the end of wheat sowing, autumn work in England, when farm workers were traditionally given a cake at the close of the planting, and caraway comfits and seeds were a common finish to a meal on the grounds that they settled the stomach. The formula here is the equal-weights pound-cake ratio that had become a commonplace of English baking by the eighteenth century, before chemical raising agents arrived in the nineteenth: equal weights of butter, sugar and eggs, lifted only by long beating, which is why period receipts are so insistent on how and in what order things are creamed and whipped. The heavy hand with nutmeg, cinnamon and caraway marks it as a "rich" cake, the sort often said to be meant for company rather than everyday eating, and the direction to beat in the flour "a little before sending it away" is a reminder that many kitchens of the time had no reliable oven of their own.