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Honey-Cake
One quart of extracted honey, 1/2 pint sugar, ½ pint melted butter, 1 teaspoonful soda, dissolved in 1/2 teacup of warm water, 1½ of a nutmeg and 1 teaspoonful of ginger . Mix these ingredients and then work in flour and roll. Cut in thin cakes and bake on buttered tins in a quick oven.
This is a rolled honey cookie rather than a layer cake, and it is written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what the dough should feel like. Two of its measurements are almost certainly garbled in the original printing, so treat the proportions with suspicion before you scale.
- The butter quantityThe printed page gives half a pint of melted butter against a quart of honey, which is what our text now reads. Work the flour in gradually so the dough comes together stiff enough to roll.
- "1½ of a nutmeg"Read this as half a nutmeg, freshly grated, which is roughly a teaspoon. A nutmeg and a half in a single batch would swamp the honey and the ginger both.
- Extracted honeyHoney spun out of the comb in a centrifugal extractor, as opposed to comb honey or honey strained with wax in it. Ordinary liquid honey is close enough for the purpose. A quart weighs about 3 lb.
- Soda, not baking powderThe teaspoon of soda dissolved in warm water will react with the acidity of the honey as well as lift the dough. Keep it as soda; baking powder will not brown the same way.
- No flour quantity is givenThe recipe simply says to "work in flour," leaving the cook to judge when the dough is stiff enough to roll without sticking. Expect to use a great deal of it against a quart of honey. Chilling the dough helps; honey doughs are slack when warm and firm up considerably cold.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-425F in modern terms; the book gives no temperatures. Thin honey cakes bake fast, a matter of minutes, and honey takes them from browned to burnt quickly. Watch the first tray and adjust rather than trusting a clock.
- Buttered tinsParchment is better here. Honey doughs stick and scorch on the bottom, and butter on bare metal at 450F will smoke.
- Yield and keepingAs written this is an enormous batch, many dozens of thin cakes; consider quartering it. Spiced honey doughs keep well, and stale cakes are traditionally softened in a tin with a slice of apple.
Rolled, spiced honey biscuits of this kind descend from the northern European lebkuchen and pfefferkuchen tradition, where honey, ginger and nutmeg were combined into a stiff dough that kept for weeks -- a family of honey-based spice doughs often said to be related to gingerbread. In American kitchens they plausibly stayed useful long after cane sugar became cheap, since a hive produced sweetener you did not have to buy, and extracted honey in quart quantities would be what a beekeeping family had on hand. The half-pint of sugar here is a supplement, not the base, which is the reverse of most cake recipes printed alongside it.