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Roumanian Cake
Mix 1 1/2 pounds flour with 2 ounces sugar, grated rind of a lemon, 1/2 teaspoonful of cinnamon, and a pinch of powdered cloves. Warm 1/2 pound of honey, add this, and knead all well. Cover and set to rise 1 hour. Roll out 1 inch thick, put in pie plates, cover with chopped nuts and brown sugar, and bake in moderate oven. Cut into strips, and eat hot or cold.
A dense honey dough of the lebkuchen family, written down with the brevity of a cook who already knew what it should look like. Two things in it need attention before you start: there is no leavening listed, and there is almost no liquid.
- The missing leaveningThe instruction to "set to rise 1 hour" implies a raising agent that the text never names. Period honey cakes of this type used either baker's ammonia (hartshorn), potash, or a little yeast. Without one, the hour's rest simply hydrates the dough; add about 2 teaspoons of baking powder or 1 teaspoon of baking soda to the dry flour if you want any lift at all.
- The dough will not come together as writtenOne and a half pounds of flour against half a pound of honey and 2 ounces of sugar gives a mixture that is essentially crumbs. Expect to work in 1/2 to 3/4 cup of warm water, milk, or a beaten egg or two until it kneads into a stiff, tacky mass — closer to gingerbread dough than to bread dough.
- Weights in cups1 1/2 lb flour is roughly 5 1/2 cups; 1/2 lb honey is about 2/3 cup; 2 oz sugar is 1/4 cup. Weigh the flour if you can, since scooping easily adds another cup and makes a dry problem worse.
- Warming the honeyWarm it only to blood heat so it pours freely. Honey held near a simmer darkens and can pick up a scorched flavour, and if you are using yeast rather than a chemical leavener, hot honey will kill it.
- Moderate oven350F. At an inch thick this dough bakes slowly — allow 25 to 35 minutes, and test with a skewer rather than by colour, since the honey browns the surface long before the centre sets.
- Pie platesShallow round tins, 8 or 9 inches. Grease and line the bases; honey doughs weld themselves to metal. At an inch thick the recipe will fill one, or at most two, plates.
- The nut and sugar toppingPress the chopped nuts and brown sugar firmly into the surface before baking, or they will slide off when you cut the strips. Walnuts are a common choice in cakes of this kind.
- Yield and keepingRoughly 24 to 30 strips, depending how you cut them. Honey cakes of this type generally improve after a day or two in a tin — the crumb softens and the spice comes forward — though the recipe itself says to eat it hot or cold.
Honey, flour and warm spice with no butter and no eggs is one of the oldest cake formulas in Europe, surviving in the German Lebkuchen, the Polish piernik, and the Romanian turtă dulce — turtă meaning a flat round cake — which is still sold as spiced honey slabs and moulded figures at fairs and Christmas markets. The type spread through Central and Eastern Europe with the medieval honey trade and stayed popular partly because it keeps for weeks and needs no dairy, which made it suitable for fast days and for Jewish households keeping meat and milk apart; the honey cake eaten at Rosh Hashanah is a relative of the same family, though it is usually made with eggs and oil. A recipe titled simply "Roumanian Cake" is the kind of foreign dish English-language collections gathered, and such recipes are often precise about the flavourings while vague about the parts a local cook would have known by heart — which may be how the leavening went missing.