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Real English Banbury Cake
Take an equal quantity of clean, well-picked currants, granulated sugar and finely chopped lemon peel and mix it all together and then add a nice flavoring of ginger and cinnamon; now add good fresh butter, enough to form the whole into a nice paste. Take the best puff paste, roll it out in a sheet one-fourth of an inch thick; cut this in pieces two inches square and place a piece of the prepared butter, currants, etc., in the center of each; now take the two corners, the one nearest to you and the one opposite you, bring them up, press them together, and then with the palm of the hand press them down flat. This makes the pieces oval in shape and leaves two ends which are folded together at liberty to rise; now wash the part that is not folded with water and add as much powdered sugar as you can get to remain on. Bake these in a slow heat. These are a little expensive, but are very fine and are the real English Banbury.
A currant-and-peel filling bound with butter rather than the usual egg or breadcrumb mixture, sealed in puff paste. The proportions are given only as ratios, so a little arithmetic is needed before you start.
- Scaling the filling"Equal quantity" is most naturally read as by weight, though the recipe does not say. Something like 4 oz each of currants, granulated sugar and chopped peel, with 2-3 oz butter, gives a manageable batch.
- Lemon peel means candiedLemon peel -- Most likely candied lemon peel, as in other Banbury recipes of the period, rather than fresh zest; the recipe itself does not specify.
- Spicing"A nice flavoring" is left to the cook. For the quantity above, about half a teaspoon each of ground ginger and cinnamon is in keeping with the period; Banbury fillings often took a little nutmeg or allspice as well.
- Butter, and keeping it coldAdd butter only until the mixture just coheres. Then chill the filling firm before it goes onto the pastry, or it will melt into the puff paste and prevent it rising.
- Cut them largerTwo-inch squares of quarter-inch puff paste will hold very little. Three to three and a half inches is more workable, and the paste is easier rolled a shade thinner.
- "A slow heat"Usually taken to mean somewhere in the region of 300-325F. A hotter start to lift the puff paste, dropping back afterwards, is a departure from what this recipe actually instructs.
- The sugar crustBrush only the smooth, unfolded surface with water and load it with as much powdered sugar as will stay on, as directed. The recipe does not say which way up they go on the sheet.
- YieldRoughly a dozen at the larger size suggested above; cut into the two-inch squares the recipe specifies, a pound of puff paste would give considerably more. They keep several days in a tin.
Banbury cakes are named for the market town in Oxfordshire, where oval spiced currant pastries have long been sold — a shop on Parsons Street is traditionally said to have been baking them continuously from the 1600s. They belong to the same family as the Lancashire Eccles and Chorley cakes: a rich fruit-and-peel filling enclosed in pastry rather than baked as a cake proper. The insistence in the title that this is the real English Banbury tells you something about the American market for such recipes; the compilers also felt obliged to warn that candied peel and currants made the recipe "a little expensive," which in a Southern household they certainly were.