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Southern Seed Cake
Cream, one cup sugar, and one-third cup butter; add yolks of two eggs, one-half cup sweet milk, two tea-spoons baking-powder sifted in two cups flour, one table-spoon caraway seed, one grated nutmeg and well-beaten whites. This has been tried and approved in our family for years. -Mrs. Ed. Shields, Ala.
A small, plain butter cake with no instructions for pan or oven, which is typical of the period — the writer assumed the reader knew her own stove. A few notes on quantities and method.
- The nutmeg is the thing to watchOne whole nutmeg, grated, yields roughly 2 to 3 teaspoons, which will dominate a cake built on a single cup of sugar. Half a nutmeg is closer to modern taste; use the whole one only if you want the spice forward, as she clearly did.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabbered milk also common in Southern kitchens. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- One-third cup butter5 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon. Soften it well before creaming; with this little fat against a cup of sugar the mixture will look sandy rather than fluffy, which is correct.
- Order of workThe beaten whites are listed last and would be folded in at that point, though the recipe does not say so.
- OvenThe recipe gives none. A moderate oven, about 350F, suits it: an 8-inch round or a small loaf pan, greased and floured, will take 30 to 40 minutes; test with a skewer at the center.
- CarawayA tablespoon is generous by current habit. Toasting the seeds briefly in a dry pan sharpens them; crushing a portion spreads the flavor without leaving whole seeds in every bite.
- YieldA single modest layer or small loaf, eight to ten thin slices. It is a plain teacake, better on the second day and good with tea or a glass of sherry.
Seed cake is an English inheritance, a plain butter cake flavored with caraway that appears in British household books from the seventeenth century onward and traveled intact into American kitchens. Caraway was long thought to aid digestion, and seed cake held a settled place as the cake you offered a caller — sturdy, unfrosted, keeping well without ice. What makes this version late-nineteenth-century American rather than Georgian English is the baking powder: earlier seed cakes were leavened with yeast or with long beating of many eggs, and the two teaspoons sifted into the flour here mark the arrival of chemical leavening in ordinary home baking. The Dixie Cook Book, like the Buckeye books it descends from, gathered contributions by name and place, and Mrs. Shields's note that the recipe had been tried in her family for years reads as what was often taken, in such books, as a warrant of reliability.