Seed-Cake, Common
INGREDIENTS for good-sized cake.- quartern of dough, 1/4 lb. of good dripping, 6 oz. of moist sugar, oz. of caraway seeds, 1 egg.
AVERAGE COST, 8d.
If the dough is sent in from the baker's, put it in a basin covered with a cloth, and set it in a warm place to rise. Then with a wooden spoon beat the dripping to a liquid; add it, with the other ingredients, to the dough, and beat it until everything is very thoroughly mixed Put it into a buttered tin, and bake the cake for rather more than 2 hours.
TIME. Rather more than 2 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time.
This is a dough cake: plain bread dough enriched with fat, sugar and seed rather than a creamed batter. It behaves like sweet bread, and the fermentation, not the beating, does the lifting.
- A quartern of doughA quartern was the baker's unit derived from a quarter of a peck, about 3 1/2 lb of flour, so a quartern of dough is a large quantity, upwards of 4 lb once mixed. Use about 3 1/2 lb of plain white bread dough, or the dough from a recipe using 2 lb of flour if you want a more manageable cake.
- The caraway quantity is missingThe print reads "oz. of caraway seeds" with the number lost. Comparable Victorian seed cakes use 1/2 to 1 oz for this weight of dough; start at 1/2 oz (about 2 tablespoons) unless you want the pronounced medicinal note the period liked.
- DrippingBeef dripping was the cheap fat of the household and gives a savoury edge that suits caraway. Butter or lard both work; 1/4 lb is 4 oz, about half a cup.
- Moist sugarUnrefined soft brown sugar, damp and clumping. Light brown sugar is the closest modern match; white granulated will make a paler, flatter-tasting cake.
- Warm the dripping, do not brown itDripping to a liquid -- The original works the dripping to a liquid with a wooden spoon rather than heating it; if you do warm it, keep it barely soft. Fat hot enough to scald will damage the yeast and give a heavy, close-textured cake.
- Prove again in the tinThe original goes straight from mixing to the oven, but the sugar and fat knock the dough back badly. Let it rise in the buttered tin until noticeably puffed, 45 minutes to an hour in a warm kitchen, before baking.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 325-350F, suits a cake this size; over two hours at that heat the crust will darken considerably, so cover the top with foil once it has coloured.
- Testing and yieldA skewer to the centre should come out clean and the loaf should sound hollow underneath; internal temperature around 200F. The full quartern makes a very large cake, and it is best eaten within two days or toasted and buttered after that.
Seed cake was one of the fixtures of the nineteenth-century tea table, and caraway was so firmly associated with cake that "seed" needed no further explanation. Beeton gives more than one version, and the label "Common" marks this as the economical one: it uses dripping instead of butter, moist sugar instead of loaf, and above all it starts from a quartern of bread dough bought or fetched from the baker. That last detail is the period speaking: the dough came in from the baker's rather than being raised at home. Caraway's link with cake is often traced to its older role as a digestive seed served after meals and to the seed-cakes given to farm workers at sowing time, though both connections are traditional rather than documented.