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Eighth Day: Grace
As Grace had foretold, her father made no objections, and in the course of the morning Aunt Jane went into Mrs. Lane's to arrange with her about particulars. "Well, Aunt Jane, what are we to have?" inquired Grace when her aunt came back. "Oh, we have arranged a very nice bill of fare; but never mind going over it now. I will just give you some new recipes, and we can talk over the rest of the programme afterwards." No. 98-VEAL LOAF.
Three lbs. raw veal and half a lb. raw pork chopped fine together; three Boston crackers rolled fine, or a cup and a half of bread crumbs; three eggs, one teaspoonful black pepper, a very little sage, the same of mace, one teaspoonful salt. Pack into square tin pans; strew bread crumbs or grated cracker over the top, and while baking, baste with a tablespoonful of butter dissolved in boiling water. Bake three hours in a moderate oven. "What is 'basting,' Aunt Jane?" asked Grace. "Pouring liquid over something that is baking or roast. ing. This keeps it moist, and cements the other ingredients together." "What is the difference between baking and roasting?" "In old times it used to be called baking when things were cooked in an oven, and roasting when they were placed before the open fire on a spit, or what is called a 'Dutch oven '-a tin arrangement with only the side toward the fire open, so that the whole heat, direct and reflected, might be concentrated on the meat; but in these days when there are very few open fires, every thing is baked, and it is generally said that meat is roasted, and all other things baked, in the oven. Here are some cake recipes."
No. 99-FRENCH CAKE.
One pound sugar, one-half do. butter, one do. currants, dredged with flour, three cups flour, four eggs; spice to taste, half a teaspoonful soda dissolved in three tablespoonfuls milk. No. 100-LOAF CAKE.
Two cups risen dough taken from bread after its second rising. Have ready two cups sugar, one do. butter, three eggs, one teaspoonful soda, two tablespoonfuls milk or cream, half a pound seeded raisins, one teaspoonful cloves, half as much grated nutmeg.
Three recipes threaded through a lesson on basting: a veal loaf and two cakes, one of them yeast-raised from bread dough. The measurements assume a cook who already knows what a loaf should look like, so a few things need filling in.
- "do." means dittoIn the cake recipes "one-half do. butter, one do. currants" repeats the unit just given — half a pound of butter, one pound of currants. It is a printer's shorthand, not an ingredient.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" is usually read as somewhere around 350-375F. Note that the recipe uses the phrase only for the veal loaf; no temperature at all is given for either cake.
- Three hours is far too long for the veal loafThree hours is longer than the loaf needs -- Three and a half pounds of chopped meat will reach a safe 160F well before three hours; an hour and a half is a reasonable expectation, though the recipe divides the mixture between pans and depth will change it. Cook to temperature rather than to the clock, or the loaf will be dry and grainy. The long time may owe something to the unpredictability of a wood- or coal-fired range oven.
- Boston crackersA large, plain, slightly sweet soda cracker, now hard to find. The recipe already gives the substitution: a cup and a half of dry breadcrumbs.
- Basting a meat loafA tablespoon of butter melted into boiling water, spooned over the loaf as it bakes; the recipe does not say how often. Aunt Jane's stated reason is that it keeps the meat moist and cements the ingredients together, and it will also keep the crumb topping from scorching. Ground veal is very lean, so this matters more here than it would with a beef loaf.
- Mace and sage"A very little" of each means around a quarter teaspoon; mace is the outer covering of nutmeg and is sharper and lighter than nutmeg itself. Both go bitter in quantity, which is why the original hedges.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, a small seedless grape — not fresh red or black currants. Dredging them in flour before folding them in keeps them suspended rather than settling to the bottom.
- Soda without an acidBoth cakes call for soda dissolved in milk or cream. If the milk was sour, as household milk often was, the soda had something to react with; with fresh milk you will get very little lift. The French cake in particular is close to a pound cake and depends mainly on creaming the butter and sugar thoroughly.
- The loaf cake needs a second riseThe recipe omits it. The risen bread dough is the principal leavening (there is also a teaspoonful of soda), so once the sugar, butter, eggs and fruit are worked in, the batter wants to be left to rise again in a warm place until visibly puffed before it goes into the oven. No baking time or temperature is given in the original.
- YieldThe veal loaf feeds eight to ten. Each cake makes one large loaf or tube cake; the French cake, being a pound of sugar and a pound of fruit, is heavy and keeps for a week wrapped.
Six Little Cooks belongs to a small genre of the 1870s and 1880s: cookbooks written as stories, in which children learn to cook under an aunt or mother while the reader learns alongside them. Aunt Jane's digression on baking versus roasting is doing real work — the open hearth and the tin "Dutch oven" reflector she describes were within living memory for her readers, but the closed cast-iron range had displaced them, and the vocabulary had not caught up. The loaf cake is the older survival of the three recipes: before chemical leavening was cheap and reliable, sweet cakes were commonly raised by borrowing a piece of the household's bread dough, a practice generally understood to be considerably older than the book itself. By the time this book was printed it was already a nostalgic recipe, sitting on the page beside a cake leavened with soda.