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Soda Cake
Half pound sifted flour, two ounces fine sugar, two ounces butter, one ounce currants, half teaspoon carbonate soda, quarter of a pint cold milk and one raw egg.
Place in a basin the butter, flour and sugar, and knead thoroughly. Mix the soda with the milk, and then briskly mix all the ingredients together. Place the mixture into a lightly buttered tin. Set in the hot oven and bake for forty-five minutes. Remove, cut the cake into six equal pieces and serve.
A plain currant cake of the English school, mixed like a rubbed-in pastry and leavened with soda alone. A few of the original's numbers need translating, and one of them needs disregarding.
- Weights in cupsHalf a pound of flour is about 2 cups (227 g); 2 ounces of sugar is 1/4 cup; 2 ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons; 1 ounce of currants is roughly 3 tablespoons. With the milk and egg the result is a soft mixture rather than a firm dough.
- The quarter pintAn Imperial quarter pint is 5 fl oz, a US quarter pint 4 fl oz, so the intended quantity is ambiguous. Start with 4 fl oz and add the rest only if the mixture will not come together.
- Soda with no acidCarbonate of soda works best with something sour to react with, and sweet milk gives it very little. Expect modest rise and possibly a faint soapy edge; buttermilk or sour milk in place of the cold milk would react more fully.
- "Kneaded" means rubbedButter, flour and sugar worked together with the fingertips until sandy, as for shortcrust. Do not develop the dough after the milk goes in temore than needed to combine, or the crumb turns tough.
- Oven and timeA "hot oven" of the period is usually taken as somewhere around 400-425F. At that heat a cake of this size will likely be done well before the stated forty-five minutes, so test with a skewer rather than the clock.
- Tin sizeNo tin is specified. A 7-inch round or a 6-inch square suits this quantity, giving a fairly shallow cake that can be divided into the six equal pieces the recipe asks for.
- ServingSix modest pieces, meant for tea and best eaten the day it is baked. Soda-leavened cakes with this little fat go dry by the second day.
Soda cake belongs to the family of quick, everyday British tea cakes made possible once bicarbonate of soda became a cheap grocery item in the nineteenth century, offering an alternative to yeast doughs and to the long beating that a creamed pound cake demanded. The method here is telling: the fat is rubbed into the flour rather than creamed, which is scone and shortcake technique rather than cake technique, and the currants are a token ounce, enough for flavour but nothing like the fruit load of a plum cake. The thrift of the formula is its defining feature.