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Banbury Squares
Roll Chopped Paste one fourth inch thick; cut in three inch squares. Put one and one half teaspoons Banbury mixture on one side of square, wet edges, fold to make a triangle, prick, and bake.
This is an assembly instruction from a book that assumes you have already made two other things: the Chopped Paste and the Banbury mixture. Both appear elsewhere in Lowney's, and neither is stated here.
- Chopped pasteA plain flaky pastry, so called because the cold fat is chopped into the flour with a knife rather than rubbed in. A plain pie dough rolled to a quarter inch is the nearest modern substitute.
- Banbury mixtureTypically chopped raisins with sugar, beaten egg, lemon juice and rind, and cracker or bread crumbs to bind; some versions add currants. Whether it is cooked first or mixed raw varies by book, so check Lowney's own recipe. Whatever the method, it should be stiff rather than wet or it will run at the seam.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Pastry of this kind wants a hot oven; about 400-425F for roughly 15 to 20 minutes, until the edges are set and the tops are pale gold, should suit.
- Wet edgesWater applied with a fingertip to two adjacent edges is the usual reading, though egg white was also used for sealing. Press the fold firmly and crimp with a fork; a dried-fruit filling leaks readily and burnt sugar welds the pastry to the sheet.
- PrickThis is a vent, not decoration. Two or three fork stabs through the top layer only let steam escape so the triangle does not burst along the crimp.
- ServingCool on a rack before eating. The filling holds heat far longer than the pastry suggests, and these are better at room temperature, when the fruit has firmed.
Banbury cakes take their name from the Oxfordshire market town, where oval spiced currant pastries have been sold since at least the seventeenth century; a shop in Banbury is traditionally said to have been baking them from the 1630s. The English original is an enclosed oval of flaky pastry with a currant, peel and spice filling, sent out by coach and later by rail as a regional specialty. American cookbooks absorbed the filling but not the shape, and by the turn of the twentieth century "Banbury" in a domestic manual such as Lowney's had come to mean the raisin-and-currant mixture itself, spooned into tarts, turnovers or, as here, squares folded into triangles. Building a book out of component recipes that cross-reference one another "Chopped Paste" here, "Banbury mixture" there was standard practice in the era's cookery writing.