Seed Cake recipe

In conjunction with our 'Lost Victorian City' exhibition, we've dug into the archives to recover some of the tastes of Victorian London. Some might be familiar, others less so, but we'll have fun along the way!

The Recipe

The following recipe comes from an 1889 publication called "Instruction in Cookery" published by the School Board for London. We have gradually been exploring the recipe book and here we spotlight one of your experiences of making the seed cake!

Ingredients:

• 10 ozs. of Flour
• 2 ozs. of Dripping
• 2 ozs. of Sugar
• 2 teaspoonsful of Carraway Seeds
• 1 teaspoonful of Baking Powder
• A little Salt
• 1 Egg
• ½ gill or more Milk

Method: -

Grease a cake-tin. Break egg into a basin, see that it is fresh; beat up with a fork; add milk. Put flour into another basin; add salt; mix it with the flour; rub dripping in lightly; mix with a spoon the baking powder, seeds and sugar. Make it a very stiff paste with egg and milk. Turn it into a tin; bake in a hot oven about 1 hour. When done, turn it out of tin, and put on its side to get cold. Cake should not be cut hot. Time, 1 ¼ hour.

The experience

Richard from Buckinghamshire, reported that he switched the dripping to baking margarine and that 1 gill of milk is equivalent to ¼ pint of milk. As a former baker, Richard helpfully suggests the following method:

Place all the dry ingredients in a bowl and mix together. Then add milk and the beaten egg. Mix until you have a dropping consistency, you may have to add a touch more milk. The original recipe says bake in a hot oven for an hour. I suggest a pre-heated oven of 160 degrees Celsius (Gas Mark 3) for 50 minutes, test with a skewer to see if baked through and it should come out clean.

Verdict

A pleasant tasting slice of cake, nice with a cup of tea. Taste is quite hard to describe, it has a minty, liquorice and aniseed flavour.

Why not try the recipe yourself and let us know how it went on social media by using, #LostVictorianCityRecipes.

Historical Context

The eagle-eyed will have spotted that 'carraway' is spelt with two r’s in this recipe. But more commonly, it is spelt caraway. Caraway-seed biscuits were traditionally made to mark the end of the sowing of the spring wheat. The cake had been popular during the 1700s and throughout the Victorian period.

There is mention of the cake by Charles Dickens in his book David Copperfield, 1850:

It was the pleasantest tea-table in the world. Miss Clarissa presided. I cut and handed the sweet seed-cake – the little sisters had a bird-like fondness for picking up seeds and pecking up sugar…