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Soda Cakes
Mix one teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda with one pound of flour, and rub into it half a pound of warm butter. When quite smooth, add three beaten eggs, half a pound of currants washed and dried, half a pound of caster-sugar, and a few caraway seeds. When thoroughly mixed, put in buttered tin, and bake.
A plain British-style fruit-and-seed cake, given in the compressed style of a late Victorian household book: weights only, no pan size, no oven, no time. The proportions are sound but a few things need translating.
- Weights to volumeOne pound of flour is about 3½ to 4 cups; half a pound of butter is two sticks; half a pound of caster sugar is roughly a cup plus two tablespoons; half a pound of currants is about 1½ cups. Weighing is far more reliable here than scooping, since the batter is stiff and small flour errors show.
- Caster sugarSuperfine sugar, not confectioners'. Granulated will work but dissolves less readily in a rich, low-moisture dough; a short spin in a food processor turns granulated into caster.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small black raisin, not fresh red or black currants. "Washed and dried" mattered when dried fruit arrived gritty and stemmed; today rinse only if the fruit is dusty, and dry it well or it will streak the crumb.
- The soda has nothing to work onA teaspoon of bicarbonate with no buttermilk, sour milk, vinegar or treacle in the mix has no acid to react with. Expect a dense, close, biscuit-like cake rather than a light one, and possibly a faint soapy or metallic edge if the soda is not thoroughly distributed through the flour first, which is what the recipe's opening instruction is for.
- "Warm butter"Soft enough to rub into flour with the fingertips, not melted. Melted butter here gives a greasy, heavy cake.
- Caraway"A few" suggests about one to two teaspoons for a pound of flour. Caraway was the characteristic seed-cake flavouring in British baking; it is assertive, and a scant teaspoon is enough for modern palates.
- Tin and ovenThe recipe names no oven heat, tin or time. A modern approach: 350F, in a buttered and lined 9-inch square or 9x5-inch loaf tin, 45 to 60 minutes; baked as a shallow slab and cut into squares, 25 to 35 minutes. Test with a skewer at the centre.
- YieldClose to 3 pounds of batter by the listed weights, which gives one large loaf or roughly 16 squares. The cake keeps well wrapped for several days.
Soda cakes belong to the plain end of the British baking repertoire, the everyday cousin of the seed cake and the currant loaf, made at home with whatever chemical leavening had reached the pantry. Bicarbonate of soda was in general kitchen use from about the middle of the nineteenth century, and in a recipe like this one the soda is doing little more than the eggs already do, which is why the results are firm rather than airy. Caraway with dried currants is often said to be the standard flavouring of English seed cakes, and by Oscar Tschirky's day it read as homely and old-fashioned rather than fashionable. Its appearance in a Waldorf book is a reminder that these late-1890s compilations were not restaurant menus but broad reference collections, sweeping in British and domestic recipes alongside the hotel's own dishes.