[Sca-cooks] Great Cake recipe was Johnnae's Confectionery Display at Rose Tourney

[johnna holloway]

Sue Clemenger wrote:>
> And recipes, Your Majesty....we *need* to get her recipes <g>.> --Maire, charter member of the Artemisian Dessert-Consumers Guild ;-D
>
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As requested, I will post the recipes that I adapted and used for my
'banquetting stuffe' dishes as I get them typed
up into a recipe format...
Johnnae llyn Lewis  Johnna Holloway


A Great Cake from the Rose Tourney

The recipe---
S 151 TO MAKE A GREAT CAKE
Take a peck of flower & put to it 10 eggs beaten; take out 3
of ye whites. Put in nutmeg, cinnamond, cloves, & mace, of
each a quarter of an ounce; A full quart of Ale barme, &
mingle with ye flower two pound of fresh butter. When it
allmoste kneaded, put in 6 spoonfulls of hot water to it, &
10 pounds of currans, & halfe a pound of sugar beaten. Let it ly
by ye fire to rise, & then bake it.
Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery. pp.315

This is one of four recipes for ale barm or yeast leavened cakes found
in 'A Booke of Sweetmeats', which is the second manuscripts of the two
that make up
Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery.  Kenelme Digbie or Digby in his
 The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby, Opened had a similar recipe for "An
Excellent Cake" in his collection. Other cakes of the same type include
Gervase Markham's Banbury Cake and one entitled "To Make a Good Cake"
from The Gentlewoman's Cabinet Unlocked. Rebecca Price in her culinary
manuscript included recipes for "rich" and "not rich" cakes, "good" and
"very good" cakes, and lastly a recipe for "A very good, and a Rich
Cake, often made by me." Elizabeth David would remark that over the
centuries every village and town in the British Isles would develop its
own speciality yeast bread or cake. The recipes mentioned here form the
background of those cakes or breads.

Ingredients--
Karen Hess provided some suggestions as to the amounts required for a
quarter version of the S 151 recipe.
8 cups flour, 3 eggs, minus 1 white, 3/4 teaspoons each of the
spices, 1 cup barm made from 1 cup imported ale and 1 ounce
yeast, 1 cup sweet butter, 2 tablespoons hot water, and 2 1/2
pounds currants, 1/4 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon salt.
Bake at 350 degrees F for an hour.

When one examines the proportions given in the suggested amounts of the
flour to the currants in these original recipes, one often comes up with
a one to one ratio of flour to currants. Hess holds to this rule as 8
cups of flour at 3 1/3 cups of flour per pound equals
approximately 2 and 1/2 pounds, which is her suggested amount of
currants. I thought 1/2 pound of currants would be adequate for my cake
and for a banquet in June. Pepys may have dined on a very rich currant
cake in the winter of 1661, but for our ladies a less rich cake might
well do better. There would afterall be currants incorporated in some of
the other dishes as well. I cut back on the currants and to compensate
for losing part of the sweetness of the currants, increased the sugar to
1 cup. I also used
Sam Adams' Summer Ale, an American product for the Ale. Since I used a
whole 12    ounce bottle, I did not add the called for 2 Tablespoons hot
water. Sam Adams' uses Grains of Paradise and lemon zest in its summer
ale.

Ingredients used for my cake:
8 cups all purpose flour, 3 eggs, minus 1 white, 1 teaspoon each of the
spices: nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, & mace, ale barm made from 1 bottle of
Sam Adams' Summer Ale and 1 tablespoon yeast, 1 cup butter, and  1/2
pounds currants, 1 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon salt.

I did not have a fire to let the cake rise by, so I used my kitchen's
modern equivalent. I combined all the ingredients, except for the
currants in my bread machine and let the dough mix and rise on the
machine's dough cycle. I then added the currants to the dough just prior
to placing the dough into the chosen baking pan. This kept the currants
whole and prevented the bread machine blade from knocking them about
into bits and pieces.

[Be sure that your machine can handle a dough of 8 cups of flour before
doing the cake
in your machine. Otherwise one should make the recipe up and handle it
as
one does a rich yeasted dough. Mix, knead and let rise and then place in
a cake pan of one's choice.]
I baked mine in a reproduction [albeit non-stick] 18th century cake pan,
which is the earliest documented cake tin style that I own. A 12 cup pan
is necessary for this amount of dough. Hess thinks they may have been
baked in hoops or even baked without a hoop. I thought it worked well in
this pan. [For a similar pan, although not exactly the same, see
Kaiser's Charlotte Bundform.]

Bake in an oven at 350 degrees F for approximately an hour. Check to
make sure that the cake is not burning on the top or that the currants
are getting too brown. Cover with foil, if needed. Turn out and cool on
a rake. Ice or serve plain. Mine baked in exactly an hour, but this may
vary depending on the pan used.

Icing -
My survey article on the recipes, history and uses of the words "icing",
"glazing", and "frosting", appear in the file:  Sugar-Icing-art -
11/10/01 "Sugar Icing" by Johnnae llyn Lewis. Described as: "Some notes
on sugar icing in late period
" with appropriate dated recipes. It is
located in Stefan's Florilegium at http://www.florilegium.org/


Sources:
Digby, Kenelm. The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie,
Kt.
Opened. 1669. Ed. By Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson. Prospect Books,
1997.

Markham, Gervase. The English Housewife. Edited by Michael R. Best.
McGill-Queen's University Press, 1986.

Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery. Ed. By Karen Hess. Columbia
University Press, 1981.

Price, Rebecca. The Compleat Cook, Or the Secrets of a
Seventeenth-Century
Housewife. Complied and introduced by Madeleine Masson.  Routledge
&Kegan
Paul, 1974.

[Recipe from The Gentlewoman's Cabinet Unlocked may be found in  Bridget
Henisch's Cakes and Characters. Prospect Books, 1984.]

See also:
Pepys At Table. Edited by Christopher Driver and Michelle
Berriedale-Johnson. Bell & Hyman, 1984.

David, Elizabeth. English Bread and Yeast Cookery. 1977. American
edition with notes by Karen Hess. Viking Press, 1980. [See especially
her chapter on moulds and tins and regional cakes.]

----copyright J.K. Holloway 2002--- please don't reprint without
contacting the author.