Cake, Luncheon
INGREDIENTS. -lb. of butter, 1 lb. of flour, oz. of caraway seeds, 1/21 lb. of currants, 6 oz. of moist sugar, 1 oz. of candied peel, 3 eggs, 1/21 pint of milk, 1 small teaspoonful of carbonate of soda. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Rub the butter into the flour until it is quite fine; add the caraway seeds, currants (which should be nicely washed, picked and dried), sugar, and candied peel cut into thin slices; mix these well together, and moisten with the eggs, which should be well whisked. Boil the milk, and add to it, whilst boiling, the carbonate of soda, which must be SMALL POUND CAKES. well stirred into it, and, with the milk, mix ur the other ingredients. Butter a tin, pour the cake into it, and bake it in a moderate oven from 1 to 1½ hour.
TIME.-1 to 1½ hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Cake, Nice Plain. INGREDIENTS. -1 lb. of flour, 1 teaspoonful of Borwick's baking-powder, lb. of good dripping, 1 teacupful of moist sugar, 3 eggs, 1 breakfast- CAKE, PAVINI. cupful of milk, 1 oz. of caraway seeds, ib. of currants. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Put the flour and the baking-powder into a basin; stir these together; then rub in the dripping, add the sugar, caraway seeds, and currants; whisk the eggs with the milk, and beat all together very thoroughly until the ingredients are well mixed.
Butter a tin, put in the cake, and bake it from 1 to 2 hours. Let the dripping be quite clean before using; to insure this, it is a good plan to clarify it. Beef dripping is better than any other for cakes, &c., as mutton dripping frequently has a very unpleasant flavour, which would be imparted to the preparation.
TIME.-1 to 2 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A plain rubbed-in fruit cake of the Victorian everyday sort, leavened with soda slaked in boiling milk. Several of the quantities in the printed text have lost their fractions, so read the proportions with care before you commit.
- Missing fractionsThe butter and the caraway seeds in the first recipe, and the currants and the dripping in the second, are printed without their fractions; "1/21 lb." and "1/21 pint" are almost certainly ½ lb and ½ pint. For 1 lb of flour, ½ lb butter gives a rich luncheon cake and ¼ lb a plainer one; the printed text does not settle which was meant.
- Weights and volumes1 lb of flour is about 3½ cups; ½ pint of milk is 10 imperial fl oz, a little under a US cup and a quarter. A Victorian teacupful is usually reckoned at 5 to 6 fl oz, a breakfastcupful at about 10.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F (180C, gas 4), though the book gives no temperatures. A 1 lb-of-flour cake in a deep tin will probably need the full 1½ hours; test with a skewer rather than the clock.
- Carbonate of soda in boiling milkThis is the hinge. The soda must be stirred into milk that is actually boiling and the mixture poured into the batter at once, then the cake put straight into the oven. Any delay and the gas is spent before the crumb sets.
- Moist sugarSoft light brown sugar. Granulated white will work but gives a paler, drier cake than intended.
- CarawayThe second recipe gives 1 oz of caraway seeds to a pound of flour, a very assertive amount by current taste; the first recipe's weight has lost its fraction. Half that, or less, suits most modern palates; the seed cake tradition assumed a stronger flavour than we are used to.
- Candied peelBuy whole candied citron or orange peel and slice it thin yourself. The chopped mixed peel sold in tubs is largely sugar syrup and disappears into the crumb.
- Tin and yieldThe recipe says only "butter a tin"; a deep 8-inch round tin, buttered and base-lined, suits the quantity. It should cut into roughly a dozen slices and will keep some days wrapped.
- Dripping in the second cakeBeef dripping stands in for butter in the plain version and gives a savoury-edged, close crumb. Clarify it first as directed, or substitute an equal weight of butter or lard.
Luncheon cake belongs to the plainest end of the Victorian baking repertoire: no creaming, no eggs beaten to a foam, just fat rubbed into flour like a pastry and lifted by soda slaked in hot milk. It was made to be cut at midday with cheese or tea rather than served at a dressed table. Nearby sits a "Nice Plain Cake" built on beef dripping an economy that assumed a household rendering its own fat and reluctant to waste it. The caraway seed running through both is the older English taste for seed cake, ubiquitous in nineteenth-century baking and largely out of fashion within two generations. The reference to Borwick's baking-powder dates the text as well: proprietary baking powders were a mid-century commercial arrival, and their mention marks this as a post-original text.