Seed Cakes
INGREDIENTS for 2 dozen cakes. lb. of butter, lb. of sugar, 1 teacupful of milk, 1 tablespoonful of caraway seeds, 1/4 teaspoonful of carbonate of soda, 4 eggs, a little salt, flour. AVERAGE Cost, 1s. 3d.
Beat the eggs well, add to them the sugar, the soda, dissolved in a little milk, then the remainder of the milk and the carawayseeds; add gradually the flour till the paste SEED CAKE. is sufficiently stiff to roll out and cut into cakes. Stamp them out, or put spoonfuls of this mixture into buttered patty-pans, and bake in a quick oven.
TIME. To bake the cakes, from 10 to 15 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A plain caraway drop cake of the sort that filled Victorian tea tables, made stiff enough to roll and stamp or dropped into patty-pans. The method as printed never tells you what to do with the butter, so treat it as a creaming step at the start.
- The butterCream the butter with the sugar first, then beat in the eggs, rather than following the printed order. The printing has lost the fractions, so the exact weights are unknown; treat butter and sugar as broadly similar to one another.
- Missing quantitiesThe amounts of butter and sugar have lost their fractions in this printing, and the flour is given only as "flour." Work by feel: add flour until the paste just holds a rolled shape, which for 4 eggs and a teacupful of milk lands near 1 lb.
- TeacupfulA Victorian teacup is usually reckoned at somewhere between 5 and 7 fl oz, smaller than a modern mug. Hold a little back if the dough is slack.
- Carbonate of sodaThis is bicarbonate of soda. A quarter teaspoon to a pound of flour is very little lift; with no acid in the mixture beyond the milk, expect a dense, biscuity cake rather than a light one. Half a teaspoon of baking powder alongside is closer to modern expectations.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F, 200-220C. At that heat 10 to 15 minutes is right for small cakes; check at 10, since caraway scorches and the bottoms colour fast in metal patty-pans.
- Patty-pansSmall shallow tartlet or bun tins. A modern 12-hole bun tray or shallow muffin tin works; grease it well, as there is no paper case here.
- CarawayA tablespoon to the full batch is assertive by current taste. Buy whole seeds and crush a few lightly to release the oil, leaving the rest whole for texture.
- YieldTwo dozen small cakes. They keep two or three days in a tin and are better the day they are made.
Seed cake was one of the most persistent English baked goods of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and caraway was its signature: cheap, keeping well, and long associated with sowing and harvest, which is often said to be the reason seed cake appeared at the end of spring sowing on farms. Mrs Beeton's book gives both a large seed cake baked as a loaf and this small-cake version, which uses the same flavouring in a stiff paste that can be rolled and stamped like biscuits, the household's way of turning a celebration cake into everyday tea fare. By the mid twentieth century caraway had fallen sharply out of British favour, and seed cake survives now more as a period reference than a standing recipe.