Scotch Cakes
INGREDIENTS for a dozen cakes.-1½ lb. of flour, lb. of butter, lb. of sugar, 2 tablespoonfuls of ground caraway-seed, 1/2 that quantity of cinnamon, a little citron or other candied-peel, cut in small slices. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Cream the butter, add the sugar, then very finely-minced sage; add a seasoning of slowly the flour; then the flavouring and pepper and salt, mix the whole well together, make it into flat cakes, and fry a nice brown.
SEASONABLE from March to October.
A caraway-scented shortbread of the plain Scottish sort, rich in butter and cut into flat rounds. The ingredient list gives quantities for the flour but not for the butter or sugar, so the proportions have to be judged.
- The missing weightsOnly the pound of flour is stated; the butter and sugar figures are absent from the text as printed. A ratio of about 1 lb flour to 8 oz butter and 4 oz sugar is often given for shortbread of this kind, but the original's intention cannot be recovered from the page.
- Method as printedThe working directions run from creaming butter and sugar into instructions for a savoury preparation with sage, pepper and salt, fried brown. Those steps belong to a different recipe and will not produce a sweet caraway cake.
- How this dough behavesCreamed butter and sugar with flour worked in gives a short, crumbly paste rather than a batter. It should be pressed together with the hands, not kneaded, or the cakes turn tough.
- OvenShortbread of this type is baked rather than fried, but the recipe as printed gives no oven and no time, so any figure is modern guesswork: a moderate oven of about 350F, until the edges are pale gold, suits flat cakes half an inch thick. They firm as they cool and should be left on the tin.
- Ground carawayTwo tablespoons of ground caraway to a pound of flour is assertive by modern taste. Ground seed is also far stronger than whole; whole seeds at the same weight give a gentler, more scattered flavour.
- Candied peelCitron peel is the large, thick-cut candied peel once sold by the slab. Mixed candied orange and lemon peel is the usual substitute, cut small so it does not tear the short dough.
- Yield and costA dozen cakes, at an average cost of one shilling and sixpence.
Caraway was for centuries one of the standard flavourings of British baking, turning up in seed cake, in caraway comfits sugared and handed round after dinner, and in the plain butter cakes of Scottish kitchens. Mrs Beeton's compilers gathered regional names like this one into an alphabetical reference, where the "Scotch" heading appears across quite unrelated dishes and implies no single fixed formula. The taste for caraway in sweet things faded through the twentieth century, which is why the two tablespoons here reads as so much bolder now than it would have to the book's original readers.