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Honey Nut-Cakes
2 8 cups sugar, 2 cups honey, 4 cups milk or water, 1 lb. almonds, 1 lb. English walnuts , 3 cents' worth each of candied lemon and orange peel, 5 cents' worth citron (the last three cut fine), 2 large tablespoonfuls soda, 2 teaspoonfuls cinnamon, teaspoonfuls ground cloves. Put the milk, sugar and honey on the stove to boil 15 minutes; skim off the scum, and take from the stove. Put in the nuts, spices, and candied fruit. Stir in as much flour as can be done with a with spoon. Set away to cool, then mix in the soda (don't make the dough too stiff.) Cover up and let stand over night, then work in enough flour to make a stiff dough . Bake when you get ready. It is well to let it stand a few days, as it will not stick so badly. Roll out a little thicker than a common cooky, cut in any shape you like. a This recipe originated in Germany, is old and tried and the cake will keep a year or more. Mrs. E. Smith.
This is German honey lebkuchen in an American home cook's shorthand: a boiled honey syrup, a mountain of nuts and candied peel, and no flour quantity or oven instruction at all. The hinge is the resting period — the dough must sit at least overnight, and the recipe is right that a few days is better.
- The sugar quantity is garbled"2 8 cups sugar" is a typesetting error. Given 2 cups honey and 4 cups milk, 8 cups sugar reads as the intended amount, but this cannot be established from the page. Anyone working from it should treat the sugar as uncertain and scale the whole thing down to a test batch first.
- Cents' worth of peelCandied citrus peel and citron were sold by the pound, and at typical grocery prices of the period 3 cents' worth would be a couple of ounces each of lemon and orange peel, 5 cents' worth of citron a few ounces. Period prices varied, so no exact conversion can be drawn from the page; the proportions matter more than the exact weight.
- Flour is by feel onlyNo flour amount is given because the dough is judged twice: soft enough to stir with a spoon on the first day, stiff enough to roll after the overnight rest. For a batch this size expect several pounds. Err soft on day one — the dough firms considerably as the honey syrup cools and hydrates the flour.
- Two tablespoons of sodaThat is not a misprint for this volume of batter; it is a very large batch, and honey is acidic enough to be partly neutralised by it. The soda goes in only after the syrup has cooled, or it will gas off before baking.
- Baking temperature and timeNone is given, and none can be inferred from the page. A moderate oven is the usual modern equivalent for dough rolled a little thicker than a common cooky; watch the first tray and take them out when set and just coloured at the edges.
- Ripening the dough"Bake when you get ready" is not laziness. Honey doughs are traditionally held cool and covered for days or weeks, which lets the flour hydrate fully and makes the sticky mass manageable. Keep it in a cool place, well covered, not in a warm kitchen.
- NutsA pound each of almonds and walnuts, chopped rather than ground, gives the coarse texture the recipe assumes. Blanched almonds are commonly used for this style; unblanched will make a darker, more rustic cake.
- Yield and keepingThis makes a very large quantity, many dozens of cakes. The claim that they keep a year is plausible for a hard, high-sugar honey cake stored airtight in a tin, though they will harden considerably over that time.
Honey cakes of this kind are the German Lebkuchen or Honigkuchen family, in which honey rather than sugar is the characteristic sweetener, spiced with the cinnamon, cloves and candied citron that came through the spice trade. The technique here — boiling the honey with liquid, working in flour, then letting the dough ripen for days before baking — follows the traditional method, and the long rest is one reason such cakes were made well ahead of Christmas and kept in tins for months. Mrs. Smith's note that the recipe "originated in Germany, is old and tried" is typical of the American community cookbook of the period, where family recipes travelled with immigrants and were priced in cents at the local grocer rather than weighed out in ounces.