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Seed-Cake, A Very Good
INGREDIENTS for good-sized cake.—3/4 lb. of butter. 3/4 oz. of caraway seeds. INGREDIENTS for good-sized cake. lb. of butter, 4 eggs, 3/4 lb. of sifted sugar, pounded mace and grated nutmeg to taste, 1 lb. of flour, oz. of caraway seeds, 1 wineglassful of brandy. AVERAGE COST, 2s.
Beat the butter to a cream; dredge in the flour; add the sugar, mace, nutmeg and caraway seeds, and mix these ingredients well together. Whisk the eggs, stir to them the brandy, and beat the cake again for 10 minutes. Put it into a tin lined with buttered paper, and bake it from 1½ to 2 hours. This cake would be equally SEMOLINA SOUP. nice made with currants, and omitting the caraway seeds.
TIME.-14 to 2 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A rich, unleavened butter cake of the pound-cake family, lifted only by air beaten into the batter and the whisked eggs. The method as printed is unusual and worth reading twice before starting.
- Missing quantitiesThe weights for the butter and the caraway seeds have dropped out of this printing, and the flour and sugar are both given as 1 lb. Seed cakes of this kind tend to use roughly equal weights of butter, sugar and flour, with caraway measured in fractions of an ounce; treat any figure you use as a reconstruction rather than the author's own.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the heat is left to the cook's judgement. A cake this rich and this deep suits about 325F, dropping to 300F if the top colours before the middle sets.
- Tin and liningA deep 8-inch round tin is about right for a cake of this scale. Line base and sides with buttered parchment standing an inch above the rim, and tie a band of brown paper or newspaper round the outside to keep the edges from hardening over a two-hour bake.
- The order of mixingDredging flour into the creamed butter before the sugar goes in is what the text specifies, and it will tend to give a closer, shorter crumb than the modern creaming order.
- The ten minutes of beatingApart from the whisked eggs, that final beating is the only leavening: there is no baking powder here. A few minutes in a stand mixer on medium will stand in for it, and the batter should visibly pale and swell.
- WineglassfulA Victorian wineglass is about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. Brandy at that quantity is for flavour and keeping, not for wetting the batter.
- CarawayBuy whole seeds and check them for freshness; stale caraway tastes dusty rather than warm. Warming them briefly in a dry pan before they go into the batter sharpens the flavour.
- Doneness and keepingStart testing at 90 minutes with a skewer to the centre. Cooled and wrapped, a cake this rich should keep well for a week or more.
Seed cake is one of the oldest surviving English cake types, and the seed is usually, though not invariably, caraway: the seeds were eaten as sugar-coated comfits from the Tudor period onward, and Shakespeare has Shallow offer Falstaff a pippin with a dish of caraways. The cake is traditionally associated with the end of spring sowing, when farm servants were said to be given one as a reward, though the connection is customary rather than firmly documented. By Beeton's day it was commonly found in the plain-cake repertoire of the middle-class household -- no fruit, no icing, cheap enough at two shillings to keep in the tin for callers, and rich enough in butter and brandy to last a fortnight -- though no single fixed form can be claimed for it. The note that currants may replace the seeds shows how interchangeable these keeping cakes were, and is often taken to hint that caraway's long popularity was already beginning to fade.