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Cornish Saffron Cake
The miner's dinner-pail cake in the region of Lake Superior and the Rocky Mountains, as well as Penzance and Lands End. 2 pounds of light dough. 6 ounces of sugar. 8 ounces of butter or poultry fat. 8 ounces of dried cherries, or raisins. Half cup of strong saffron tea. 1 pound of flour.
Mix up like scotch seed cake, manage and bake same as bread. One or two eggs improves the cake.
This is an enriched yeast bread rather than a batter cake, and the instruction to "manage and bake same as bread" is doing most of the work. Read it as: knead the fat, sugar, fruit and flour into risen dough, let it rise again, and bake in loaf tins.
- "2 pounds of light dough"Plain white bread dough that has already risen once — roughly the yield of about 1 1/4 lb of flour with water, salt and yeast to make up the weight. Any lean bread dough at full first rise will do; the recipe assumes a baker with a trough of it on hand.
- The saffron tea is the hingeSteep a generous pinch of saffron threads (about 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon, crushed) in half a cup of just-boiled water and leave it until cold, ideally several hours or overnight. Adding threads dry, or hot liquid to the dough, wastes both the colour and the aroma. Strain or leave the threads in as you prefer.
- Poultry fatRendered chicken or goose fat, kept from roasting. It works and gives a distinctly savoury-rich crumb, but butter is the usual choice now and needs to be soft, not melted.
- Dried cherriesPeriod dried cherries were sour cherries, closer to today's tart dried Montmorency than to sweet Bing. Raisins or mixed currants and peel are equally traditional in Cornwall; soak briefly in hot water if they are very hard.
- MixingWork the sugar, fat, saffron tea, eggs and the extra pound of flour into the risen dough until smooth, then add the fruit last so it is not torn apart. The dough will feel stiff and slightly greasy at first and will slacken as it comes together.
- Second rise takes longer than you expectSugar and fat slow the yeast considerably. Expect 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours in loaf tins at room temperature, until the dough is well domed and springs back slowly — pushing it into the oven early is the usual cause of a dense, damp loaf.
- OvenBake as bread: 375-400F. Two loaves in 8x4-inch tins take 35-45 minutes; the fruit and sugar brown fast, so tent with foil if the top colours before the centre is done. Internal temperature about 190F.
- YieldRoughly 4 3/4 lb of dough, which is two large loaves or three smaller ones, or upwards of a dozen buns. It keeps three or four days and toasts well, which would have suited a loaf packed for the shift.
Saffron cake and saffron buns are Cornish to the bone, and the note about Lake Superior and the Rockies records where the Cornish went. Hard-rock mining in Cornwall collapsed through the middle of the nineteenth century, and Cornish miners — the "Cousin Jacks" — carried their skills to the Michigan copper country, the Wisconsin lead district, Butte and Colorado, along with the pasty and this saffron loaf packed for the shift underground. Why an expensive Spanish spice became the everyday flavouring of a poor mining county has never been settled: the old story that Phoenician tin traders brought it is generally repeated rather than documented, and it is more likely that saffron simply arrived through Cornwall's busy ports and stuck. What matters practically is that saffron is used here for perfume and colour in a bread dough rather than for luxury, and that the fat is whatever the household had — butter if there was butter, poultry fat if not.