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Honey Cakes
Put three-quarters of a pound of butter into a saucepan on the fire until melted, then stir in two pounds and a half of sifted flour, and keep stirring until lightly brown. Turn the flour out of the saucepan onto a paste-board, and make a hollow in the center; dissolve one teaspoonful each of salt and bicarbonate of soda in a small quantity of water, then pour it into the flour and mix well, stir in enough water to make a soft flexible paste. Knead the paste well, then divide it into small portions, shape them round, make a dent in the center of each with the tip of the finger, lay them on a buttered baking-sheet, and bake them until colored. Put half a pound of honey in a saucepan with a pint of water, and stir it over the fire until reduced to a syrup. When the cakes are cooked pour the syrup over, and put them again in the oven until it is well soaked in. Arrange the cakes on a hot dish, and serve.
A plain water-and-browned-flour dough, baked dry and then soaked in honey syrup — closer to a Levantine or Central European soaked honey cake than to anything a modern reader would call a cake. Two things decide whether it works: how far you brown the flour, and how much syrup the cakes will actually take up.
- Brown the flour, but stop earlyStirring flour into melted butter and cooking it to a light brown is the hinge of the recipe: it is what gives the finished cakes their nutty flavour, since there is no sugar or spice in the dough. Take it only to the colour of pale sand over medium heat, stirring constantly. Past that it turns bitter and, more practically, loses much of its ability to form a workable dough.
- Scale it downTwo and a half pounds of flour with three-quarters of a pound of butter is hotel quantity — roughly 9 cups flour to 1.5 cups butter, yielding perhaps thirty small cakes. Quartering the recipe (10 oz flour, 3 oz butter) gives a manageable batch.
- The water is unmeasured on purpose"Enough water to make a soft flexible paste" is the only guidance given, and it varies with how long the flour was cooked. Add warm water a few tablespoons at a time; you want a dough that holds a thumbprint without cracking, softer than pasta dough and firmer than biscuit dough.
- Soda without acidA teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda in this much flour, with no buttermilk, molasses or vinegar to react with, does almost nothing for lift and can leave a faint soapy note. These are meant to be dense and biscuit-like, not risen. Reduce or omit it rather than increasing it.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 350F until the cakes are set and lightly coloured, 20 to 25 minutes for small ones. They should be dry through, since a soft centre will collapse once the syrup goes on.
- The syrupHalf a pound of honey to a pint of water is a very thin start; expect 15 to 20 minutes of simmering to reduce it to a pourable syrup that coats a spoon. Pour it over the cakes while both are hot — cold syrup on cold cakes sits on the surface instead of soaking in.
- The second bakeReturning the syruped cakes to the oven drives the honey into the crumb and firms the surface; the recipe gives no time, only 'until it is well soaked in', so check often. Honey scorches faster than sugar syrup.
- ServingOscar says a hot dish, and he means it — these are best warm, when the syrup is still loose. Cooled, they stiffen considerably and are better reheated briefly than served cold.
Honey-soaked baked cakes are among the oldest sweets in the European and Mediterranean repertoire, predating cheap refined sugar by centuries; the technique of baking a plain dough dry and then flooding it with hot syrup survives today in everything from Greek melomakarona to Middle Eastern basbousa. What is striking here is the browned flour, a savoury kitchen technique borrowed from roux-making and applied to a sweet — a move that reads as French professional training more than home baking. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf, was not himself a cook, and his 1896 Cook Book is a compendium of some nine hundred pages gathering the working repertoire of the hotel's kitchens alongside older European recipes. Items like this one, with unmeasured water and no oven temperature, were written for professionals who would judge both by feel.