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New Year Cakes
Place one pound of powdered sugar and ten ounces of butter into a basin and beat them to a cream. Add three well-beaten eggs two ounces of caraway-seeds, one grated nutmeg and one pound of flour. When thoroughly mixed, stir in one pint of milk and one gill of rose-water and mix well again. Add two pounds more of flour and work the whole to a smooth dough. Roll it out, cut into cakes and bake in a moderate oven. Serve when cold.
A very large, very plain rolled cookie of the old New York sort — no leavening, no chemical lift, just butter, sugar, spice and a great deal of flour. A few things need translating before it behaves.
- ScaleThree pounds of flour in total, plus a pound of sugar and a pint of milk, makes something on the order of eight to ten dozen cookies depending on your cutter. Quartering the recipe gives a manageable batch and still works, since nothing here depends on batch size.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered" means granulated sugar ground fine, not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Use ordinary granulated, or pulse it briefly if you want it finer.
- A gillHalf a cup. A gill of rose-water in a batch this size is assertive but not overpowering; if you scale down, scale it down with everything else, and taste-check, as modern rose waters vary enormously in strength.
- BasinA mixing bowl. Creaming a pound of sugar into ten ounces of butter by hand is slow work; a stand mixer with the paddle does it in five minutes.
- Moderate oven350F. Rolled thin — about a quarter inch — the cakes want roughly 12 to 15 minutes, until the edges are just colored. They firm considerably as they cool.
- No leaveningThere is no saleratus, soda or baking powder, and none should be added. The result is meant to be dense and crisp rather than puffed, which is why the dough takes so much flour and why the cakes keep well in a tin.
- Order of mixingThe milk and rose-water go in after the first pound of flour, then the remaining two pounds are worked in. Follow that order: adding all the liquid to the fat and sugar at once will curdle the mixture, and adding all the flour at once makes a dough you cannot work.
- CarawayTwo ounces is roughly half a cup of seed — a lot by present taste, though characteristic of the style. Reduce it if you want the nutmeg and rose to come forward.
- Serving"Serve when cold" is not incidental. Warm, these are soft and floury; cooled completely, they snap and the spices settle. They improve on the second day.
New Year cakes are a New York inheritance, generally traced to the Dutch households of New Amsterdam and the custom of keeping open house on the first of January, when callers moved from door to door and were given a glass of something and a spiced cake. Thin, hard, caraway-scented and often pressed with a carved wooden board bearing a figure or a motto, they were baked in quantity because a family might receive many visitors in a day. By the end of the nineteenth century the door-to-door calling had largely faded, but the cake survived in cookbooks as a seasonal fixture. The rose-water and caraway both mark it as old-fashioned: two flavorings long standard in English and Dutch baking that were, by then, going out of general use.