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Carraway Seed Cake
Ingredients.
One pound of Flour.
Half a pound of Butter. * If the sponge and dough when mixed are too thin, a little more flour must be worked in.
Half a pound of Castor Sugar.
One large teaspoonful of Bakingpowder.
Half an ounce of Carraway Seeds.
This entry gives quantities only; the method has been lost in the printing, and one ingredient list will not by itself produce a cake. What follows is what the numbers tell us and where the gaps lie.
- The missing liquid and eggsA pound of flour with half a pound each of butter and sugar cannot come together without eggs or milk. Comparable seed cakes in period books generally call for several eggs, sometimes with a little milk; the footnote's reference to the mixture being "too thin" suggests some wet element belongs here. Work from a complete Victorian seed cake recipe rather than guessing.
- "Sponge and dough"These are terms of yeast-raised baking, where a sponge is set to ferment before the rest of the flour goes in. They sit oddly beside a teaspoon of baking powder; why the footnote appears here cannot be established from the text as printed.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar, finer than granulated and coarser than icing sugar. It creams into butter more readily; granulated will work with a longer creaming time.
- Caraway seedsHalf an ounce is roughly two tablespoons, six to seven teaspoons, which is assertive by modern taste. Two teaspoons gives a clear caraway note without the medicinal edge. Warming the seeds briefly in a dry pan sharpens their aroma.
- Baking powderA "large teaspoonful" is an imprecise measure, probably somewhat more than a level modern teaspoon. Commercial baking powders of the period varied in strength, so do not scale this up.
- Tin and ovenA pound of flour makes a large cake: an 8-inch round or a two-pound loaf tin, lined. The original gives no oven direction; a modern equivalent would be around 350F for an hour to an hour and a quarter, tested with a skewer.
- YieldAround twelve to sixteen slices. It keeps well wrapped for several days.
Seed cake is one of the oldest surviving English cakes, and caraway was its defining flavour long before vanilla or lemon became standard. In earlier centuries the seeds were often used as comfits, sugar-coated and stirred in whole, and the cake is traditionally associated with the end of the wheat-sowing season, when farmers were said to feed it to their labourers. In time it settled into the tea table as a plain, keeping cake, sitting between the enriched yeast doughs and the creamed butter cakes. Its decline in the twentieth century is often attributed to caraway's association with rye bread and with medicine, though the explanation is far from settled; on that account the flavour that made it a fixture for three hundred years is the same one that pushed it out of fashion.