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Eccles Cakes or Tarts
Take one cupful of clean, well-picked currants, add to them one cupful of granulated sugar and one finely chopped lemon peel; add to this a nice flavoring of ground ginger and cinnamon and mix the whole well together. Now take what short crust paste or cuttings of puff paste you require and roll it out in a short one-fourth of an inch thick, then cut it up in square pieces two inches square and put a teaspoonful of the above preparation of currants, etc., in the center of each piece of pastry; then pull over the edges allowing them to lap a little in the center; then flatten them with the hand and turn them over (folded part down). Next, with rolling pin, roll them out until the currants, peel, etc., breaks through. Then place them on the baking pans, give them a few cuts across the top with a knife, wash them with milk or milk and egg, dust them with sugar and bake them a nice brown in a hot oven. This is a nice eating pastry.
A straightforward filled pastry that needs only a few translations. The one thing to get right is the rolling: the fruit is meant to press through the dough, which is what gives Eccles cakes their scorched, jammy top.
- "A hot oven"Read this as 425-450F. At that heat the pastry sets and puffs before the sugar syrup can leak and burn; 15 to 20 minutes gives the "nice brown" called for.
- "Well-picked" currantsNineteenth-century dried currants arrived with stems, grit and the occasional stone, so picking them over was real work. Modern packaged currants need only a rinse and a thorough drying, or a brief soak in hot water if they are very hard.
- The lemon peel"One finely chopped lemon peel" may well mean candied peel, the usual filling ingredient for these cakes, though the wording could equally mean the peel of a single fresh lemon. If you use fresh peel, cut the sugar, since candied peel is already sweet and fresh pith is bitter.
- Sugar to fruitEqual cups of currants and granulated sugar is very sweet by current taste. Half a cup of sugar, or a mix of brown sugar and a spoonful of butter, gives a less cloying filling.
- No butter in the fillingTraditional Eccles filling is bound with melted butter, which the recipe omits, so this mixture stays dry and loose. A tablespoon or two of melted butter stirred in makes it much easier to keep a teaspoonful together on the square of pastry.
- Pastry"Cuttings of puff paste" means the trimmings left from other work, rerolled; store-bought all-butter puff pastry is the nearest modern substitute, though rerolled trimmings rise less. Roll to a scant 1/4 inch and cut 2-inch squares; the folded cakes will spread as they are flattened and rolled.
- The rolling stepAfter folding and turning seam-side down, roll until the fruit just shows through the dough. Go gently: the point is a thin translucent top that caramelises, not torn pastry that dumps its filling onto the pan.
- YieldThe recipe sets no quantity of pastry ("what ... you require"), and a cup of currants with sugar and peel makes several dozen cakes at a teaspoonful each. Scale the filling down if you want a small batch.
- FinishingCut two or three short slashes in each top before glazing, wash with milk or beaten egg and milk, then dust with sugar. Bake on parchment and lift them off while warm, since escaped syrup sets hard as it cools.
Eccles cakes take their name from the town of Eccles, just west of Manchester, and are generally traced to commercial baking there in the late eighteenth century; by the Victorian period they were familiar enough in Britain to need no explanation. The instruction to use "cuttings of puff paste" suggests a professional origin: it seems to assume a kitchen already making puff pastry for something else and looking for a use for the scraps, which would be the kind of thrift a bakeshop, rather than a household, might practise.