Home › Cakes › Old Fashioned Seed Cake
Old Fashioned Seed Cake
2 cupfuls sugar 1½ cupfuls Crisco 4 cupfuls flour 1 teaspoonful salt 2 tablespoonfuls carraway seeds 12 eggs Cream Crisco and sugar thoroughly together, then drop in eggs one by one, beating each one in well before next is added, sift in flour and salt, add carraway seeds. Turn into Criscoed and papered loaf tin and bake in moderately hot oven one and a half hours.
Sufficient for one large cake.
This is a pound-cake formula in disguise: no baking powder, no soda, no liquid but eggs. Everything depends on how much air you beat into the fat and eggs, so treat the mixing as the recipe rather than a preliminary to it.
- The hinge: air is the only leaveningTwelve eggs beaten in one at a time into creamed fat is the entire rise. Cream the shortening and sugar until visibly pale and fluffy (5-8 minutes in a stand mixer), and add each egg only after the previous one has disappeared. If the batter looks curdled or slick, it has broken and the cake will be dense and greasy.
- CriscoStill sold, and the 1½ cupfuls means 1½ cups of solid vegetable shortening at room temperature. Butter can be substituted by weight for flavour, but it carries water and will give a slightly heavier, shorter crumb than the book intends.
- "Moderately hot oven"Period oven tables generally put this nearer 375-400F, above a plain moderate oven. For a loaf this large and this rich, 325-350F is safer over an hour and a half; the outside will be dark and dry before the centre sets at anything hotter.
- Pan sizeFour cupfuls of flour and a dozen eggs will make something in the region of ten cups of batter, more than one modern 9x5 loaf tin will hold. Divide between two large loaf tins, or use a 10-inch tube pan, and expect to shorten the baking time for smaller tins.
- "Criscoed and papered"Grease the tin, then line the base and long sides with parchment and grease that too. Nothing in this batter helps it release, and a seed cake baked ninety minutes will stick.
- Caraway, not caraway substitutesThe seeds are the point of the cake, and two tablespoons is assertive by modern taste. They are whole caraway, not cumin and not fennel; a brief dry-toasting before adding sharpens the flavour.
- DonenessIgnore the clock at the end and test: a skewer to the centre should come out clean and the cake should have stopped rising and begun to shrink slightly from the sides. Cover the top loosely with foil if it colours early.
- Yield and keeping"One large cake" is 16-20 slices. Seed cake improves after a day wrapped tightly, and keeps a week at room temperature; it is meant to be eaten in thin slices with tea, not iced.
Seed cake is one of the oldest surviving English cakes, a plain rich butter cake flavoured with caraway that was long associated with the end of spring sowing, and it appears in household books from the seventeenth century onward. By the time this recipe was printed it was already "old fashioned" — Victorian and Edwardian readers knew it as the cake of aunts and parlour tea trays. Its presence in The Story of Crisco (published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to introduce hydrogenated vegetable shortening to American cooks) is deliberate: the book worked by taking recipes housewives already trusted and swapping butter or lard for the new product, so a cake whose texture depends almost entirely on creamed fat made a useful demonstration. The caraway habit itself faded in America across the twentieth century, which is why the seeds now read as unfamiliar in a cake and familiar in rye bread.