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Merry Monarchs
I lb. (4 cups) flour 6 ozs. (3/4 cup) sugar 6 ozs. (3/4 cup) butter 3 eggs 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1/2 lb. (2 cups) currants 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract Cream the butter and sugar thoroughly together, add the eggs one at a time, and beat well after each one, add the extract, flour, salt, baking powder and currants.
Mix well and drop in pieces the size of a walnut Cakes on a buttered tin. Bake in a quick oven for eight minutes.
A stiff currant drop cake of the rock-cake family, closer to a cookie than to any pudding a modern reader would name. The proportions are workable but the dough is very dry, so read the note on liquid before you begin.
- The dough will look impossibly dryFour cups of flour against three eggs and six ounces of butter leaves very little free liquid beyond the eggs themselves, which is presumably why the mixture is dropped in walnut-sized lumps rather than spread. If it will not hold together when squeezed, work in milk a tablespoon at a time until it just coheres; two or three tablespoons should do it. Do not thin it to a batter or the shapes will spread and thin out.
- "Quick oven"Roughly 400-425F, though the term was never precise. At the upper end, walnut-sized pieces will take about the stated eight minutes, but they colour fast on the bottom; check at six. Baking at 400F for 10-12 minutes gives more margin and a more even crumb.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small black raisins, not fresh red or black currants. Two cups is a heavy load for this dough, and soaking them briefly in hot water and drying them keeps them from scorching on the surface.
- Creaming matters hereWith no liquid and only baking powder for lift, the air beaten into the butter and sugar does most of the work. Cream until visibly pale and light, and beat the full time after each egg so the mixture does not break.
- Handle the pieces lightlyRoll or drop them rough rather than smooth. A craggy surface is the point of a rock cake; polished balls bake dense.
- Yield and keepingAbout three dozen small cakes from this quantity. They are best the day they are made and go hard within two days.
- "Cakes" in the textThe stray word in "drop in pieces the size of a walnut Cakes on a buttered tin" appears to be a stray fragment, most likely a heading or transcription artefact; ignore it. A buttered tin is fine, though parchment is easier with this much sugar and fruit.
Merry Monarchs belongs to the large British family of currant drop cakes — rock cakes, rock buns, and their many variants — that appear widely in household and community cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by which time chemical baking powder had made a quick stiff dough reliable. The whimsical name is of a kind common in books of this sort, where a plain formula was given a title with some period flourish; no dish or person behind it has been identified, and any Restoration association the name suggests should be treated as decoration rather than history.