Cake, Christmas
INGREDIENTS for good-sized cake. -5 teacupfuls of flour, 1 teacupful of melted butter, 1 teacupful of cream, 1 teacupful of treacle, 1 teacupful of moist sugar, 2 eggs, oz. of powdered ginger, 1/2 lb. of raisins, 1 teaspoonful of carbonate of soda, 1 tablespoonful of vinegar. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d. Make the butter sufficiently warm to melt it, but do not allow it to oil; put the flour into a basin, add to it the sugar, ginger, and raisins, which should be stoned and cut into small pieces. When these dry ingredients are thoroughly mixed, stir in the butter, cream, treacle, and well-whisked eggs, and beat the mixture for a few minutes. Dissolve the soda in the vinegar, add it to the dough, and be particular that these latter ingredients are well incorporated with the others; put
This is a gingerbread rather than a fruit-and-marzipan Christmas cake, and the instructions break off mid-sentence in the original — the baking tin, oven and time were on the next page. Everything else you need is here.
- The teacupfulIn Beeton a teacupful is usually reckoned at about a quarter of an imperial pint, some 5 fl oz or 140 ml — noticeably less than a US cup. Five teacupfuls of flour comes to roughly 400 g; keep the same cup for every measure so the proportions hold.
- The ginger quantity is incompleteThe text as printed here reads "oz. of powdered ginger", the fraction having dropped out; other printings of the recipe give 1/2 oz. Half an ounce to an ounce (15–30 g) is a plausible range for a gingerbread this size; start at about 2 tablespoons and judge by smell.
- Treacle and moist sugarTreacle here means black treacle; unsulphured molasses is the closest substitute, though golden syrup will give a paler, milder cake. "Moist sugar" is unrefined light brown sugar.
- Carbonate of soda and vinegarCarbonate of soda is bicarbonate of soda, or baking soda. Dissolving it in vinegar makes it fizz on contact, so mix it in fast and get the cake into the tin at once — the lift is largely spent within a couple of minutes.
- Melted, not oiled butter"Do not allow it to oil" means stop before the butter separates and goes clear and greasy. Melt it gently and let it cool to barely warm, or it will start cooking the eggs.
- Oven and tinThe tin, oven and time were lost with the broken-off sentence. For a cake this heavy with treacle, a slow to moderate oven — around 325°F / 160°C as a modern equivalent — in a deep 8-inch tin, lined base and sides, is a reasonable reconstruction; reckon on 1½ to 2 hours, test with a skewer, and cover the top with paper if it darkens early.
- Yield and keepingThe mixture fills a large cake, cutting into 16 or so slices. Like most treacle gingerbreads it improves after two or three days wrapped in greaseproof paper, when the crumb softens and the spice settles.
Before the almond-pasted, royal-iced fruit cake settled in as the fixed British Christmas standard, dark spiced gingerbreads and plum cakes also had a place at Christmas, and Beeton's "Christmas Cake" belongs to that older line: treacle, ginger, raisins and a chemical raising agent rather than yeast or a long-beaten egg batter. Soda with an acid such as vinegar became common in nineteenth-century household cookery as bicarbonate of soda grew cheap and reliable, giving lift to heavy, sugar-laden batters that eggs alone would struggle with. The costing of 1s. 6d. is characteristic of the book, in which most recipes carry an average cost for the mistress of the house to set against her housekeeping; neither brandy nor candied peel nor almonds appears in the list.