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Seed Cakes
Follow recipe for Cocoanut Cream Cookies (see p. 489), using one and one-half tablespoons caraway seeds in place of cocoanut, ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 egg ¼ teaspoon salt
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: the method, the flour and the cream all live in the Cocoanut Cream Cookies recipe it points to, and only the substitution and the creaming ingredients are repeated here. A few notes before you start.
- The ingredient line runs togetherThe salt reads ¼ teaspoon on the printed page, as our text now gives. The ingredients still run together without punctuation: ½ cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 egg, ¼ teaspoon salt.
- You need the parent recipeNothing here tells you the flour or liquid. The entry cross-refers to Cocoanut Cream Cookies on p. 489; this line only swaps 1½ tablespoons caraway seed for the cocoanut and restates the creaming ingredients.
- Cocoanut is coconutThe older spelling is generally explained by a mixing-up of "coco" and "cocoa", though the details are not certain. In Farmer's day it meant dried shredded coconut, sold in packets and often sweetened.
- Caraway, not cuminBuy whole caraway seed and check it is fresh; old seed tastes of dust and faint soap. A brief toast in a dry pan before mixing wakes it up. Cumin looks similar and is not a substitute.
- Chill the doughA creamed butter dough, especially if the parent recipe includes cream, rolls badly at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator makes it easier to roll thin and cut cleanly.
- OvenNo temperature is given here; it would come from the parent recipe. Rolled cookies of this kind are usually baked somewhere in the region of 375-400F for roughly 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges just colour.
- YieldWith the flour quantity unstated, yield can only be guessed at; perhaps around four dozen cookies cut at two inches, fewer if rolled thick.
Seed cakes are much older than this book: caraway-scented cakes and biscuits were standard English baking from the sixteenth century onward, when caraway comfits (seeds coated in hard sugar) were a fashionable sweetmeat and the loose seed found its way into everything from bread to cheese. By the nineteenth century seed cake appeared both as a plain buttery loaf cake and as a thin rolled biscuit, and it carried associations with tea and with funerals. Its appearance here as a one-line variation on a coconut cookie fits the wider pattern of building a chapter out of a base recipe plus substitutions, and it suggests caraway had become one option among many rather than a headline flavour.