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M. G
One-half pound butter, one pound flour, one-half ounce caraway seeds, one-fourth pound currants, six ounces moist sugar, one ounce candied peel, three eggs one-half pint milk, one small teaspoonful of carbonate of soda; bake in a moderate oven from one to one and onehalf hours. Proved to be very good. PLAIN SPONGE FOR JELLY OR COCOANUT CAKE.
Mrs. R. Beaty.
One cup flour, one cup sugar, three eggs, yolks and whites beaten separately, one teaspoonful cream tartar, one-half teaspoonful soda, four tablespoons cold water. Flavour to taste.
Two recipes run together here: a British-style seed and currant cake, then a plain sponge batter meant to be baked in thin layers for jelly cake or coconut cake. Neither gives a tin size, and the sponge gives no oven time at all.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 325-350F. For the fruit cake, the lower end is safer over the full hour-and-a-half; the sponge layers want 350F for about 20 minutes, or a shade less if spread thin.
- Moist sugarA soft, damp unrefined sugar — light brown sugar is the closest modern equivalent. Six ounces is about three-quarters of a cup, packed.
- Carbonate of sodaBaking soda. Note that the first recipe has no acid apart from the milk, so the lift is modest and the crumb is meant to be close and firm rather than airy. If you want it lighter, soured milk or buttermilk in place of the sweet milk is the period-correct fix.
- The half pint of milkIf the book follows imperial measure, half a pint is 10 fl oz rather than the American 8. The batter should be a thick dropping consistency; hold back the last couple of ounces and judge by eye.
- Candied peelOne ounce is a scant two tablespoons, chopped fine. Buy whole candied citron or orange peel and cut it yourself — the pre-diced supermarket mix is drier and sweeter.
- CarawayHalf an ounce is roughly two tablespoons of seed, which is assertive by modern taste. A tablespoon gives a recognisable seed cake without dominating the currants.
- Tin and yieldThe fruit cake batter comes to over three pounds and needs a large tin -- an 8-9 inch round or two loaf tins, lined. The sponge fills two 8-inch layers thinly, or one 9-inch pan for splitting.
- Handling the spongeThe whites are beaten separately for a reason — fold them in last, by hand, and get the batter into the oven at once. Cream of tartar and soda together act as soon as the water hits them, and a batter left standing bakes flat.
Seed cake — butter, flour, currants and caraway, bound with eggs and milk — was a fixture of British domestic baking well before it crossed to Canada, and its appearance in a community cookbook is a straightforward transplant of English tea-table habit. The line "proved to be very good" is the signature of the genre: these books were compiled from contributors' own handwritten receipts, and such endorsements may well have served in place of any testing by the editors. Caraway in cake is much older than the recipe itself, and is often traced to the seed's long-standing use as a digestive as much as a flavouring. The second recipe shows the newer world alongside the old: a cup-measured sponge leavened with cream of tartar and soda, and baked in thin layers to be stacked with jelly or coconut in the American fashion.