Amelia Simmons' 18th Century Pound Cake Recipe

We had a little teaser of fall over the last few days but that light breeze has been replaced with an Indian monsoon season. Again. I haven't wanted to look at the oven, let alone turn it on. I took advantage of the nice weekend weather to get a little baking done.

This recipe is from Amelia Simmons' cookbook American Cookery, famous for being the first American written cookbook intended for American cooks utilizing the ingredients local to them.

This is a true pound cake recipe. A true pound cake is a cake made from a pound of flour, a pound of butter, a pound of sugar and a pound of eggs. Traditional pound cakes do not use any additional leavening agents and rely on the eggs to puff them up a bit. This recipe gives the vague "spice to taste" so I had to do a little rummaging to see what spices were popular in cakes like this and settled on cinnamon, nutmeg and carraway.

18th Century Pound Cake 

Ingredients:

- 2 Sticks Butter (1/2 Pound)
- 1 Cup Sugar
- 2 Cups Flour (3+ if you you don't have small tins and want to bake them "cookie" style)
- 1/3 Cup (2 ounces) Rosewater
- 4 Eggs
- 1 Teaspoon Cinnamon
- 1/4 teaspoon Nutmeg
- Caraway Seeds

Instructions:

This is only half the recipe which made about 20, 3 inch cakes.

Preheat oven to 350 °F. Cream the butter, add the sugar, rosewater, cinnamon and nutmeg and mix well. Crack the eggs in a separate bowl and whisk 10-15 minutes by hand. Add eggs to the butter mixture and mix until well combined. Slowly mix in the flour.

If using small tins, grease the tins and fill with batter. Add carrayway on top.

If using cookie cutters, add enough flour to create a dough you can roll out. I kneaded it with my hands a little bit. This made a very light dough. Place cakes on parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Sprinkle carraway over the cakes.

Bake cakes for 15 minutes. They won't brown more than a slight orange at the rim on the base of the cakes.


The first thing I noticed about this cake was that it tasted good soft but probably tastes even better crunchy which is probably the point. These probably get better over time which is good because if you made a whole batch you'd have around 40 small cakes on your hands.  

American Potash Cake or Long Island Pound Cake: Historical Food Fortnightly: Challenge 7

The 1700s housewife had two options when trying to get her cake to rise. For the first, she could beat eggs or egg whites strenuously for 2-3 hours or she could use yeast and let her cake rise just as she did bread.

The first method was costly in time and money. Recipes of the time call for 12-35 eggs and while eggs were a bit smaller in the days before egg grading and genetically modified hens, that is a lot of eggs for one dish.  The second method worked but the housewife would have to wait until the cake rose which can be longer than an hour.

The issue housewives faced was time. If visitors suddenly showed up, it would take at least 2 hours to make a cake. To get around this a housewife might make treats like Hannah Glasse's Portugal Cakes, which she directed lasted half a year if they were made without currants or she could make smaller "cakes" that relied solely on a few eggs for rising. Today we call these small cakes, cookies.

In the 1750s scientists were experimenting with potash, which was wood ash with the lye leeched out and some lye added back. They found that when added to food, it acted as yeast did. Potash did leaven food but it had a bad after taste. Pearlash, a more refined potash became popular in the United States. These leavens revolutionized baking for women who were used to time consuming leavening methods. In later years, saleratus became more popular and eventually baking soda.

For this Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge I used pearlash (potassium carbonate) to make American potash cake or Long Island Pound Cake, so called because the American women adapted this new technology early and apparently the women of Long Island were known for it. Pearlash was called for in four recipes in the first known American cookbook, Amelia Simmons' American Cookery in 1796.   

The Challenge: "The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread August 24 - September 6
Create a food item that reflects historical food improvements. Showcase a new discovery in food preparation, a different way of using food, or a different way of serving it. Make sure to include your documentation!"
The Recipe: This recipe was printing in more than one European publication at the time.

 

 The Date/Year and Region: 1799 U.S. and England

How Did You Make It: (a brief synopsis of the process of creation)


 Ingredients:

- 6 Cups Flour (save one cup for dusting and adjusting)
- 1/2 Pound Butter (2 sticks)
- 1 heaping teaspoon Pearlash or Baking soda (You did use enough)
- 2 Cups Buttermilk or Sour Milk
- 1/2 Cup Sugar


Instructions:

Cut butter into small pieces and mix into the flour well. Put the sugar in the buttermilk and add to the flour mixture. Dissolve baking soda in a little water, add to mixture. Blend together until a soft dough is formed. Add more flour if necessary to make a workable dough. Roll it out to about a 1/2" on a floured surface with a floured rolling pan. Cut out into small circles with a cookie cutter or cup. Place on a baking sheet and bake in a preheated oven at 400 degrees for about 10 minutes. The cakes won't spread while baking.
Time to Complete: 30 minutes

Total Cost: $8.00 I had to make 2 batches.

How Successful Was It?: (How did it taste? How did it look? Did it turn out like you thought it would?) I made the cardinal sin of cooking with potassium carbonate. I added too much, even though every instance of someone telling me they cooked with it ended with them using too much. I guess I read too much into "heaping teaspoon." I had to make a second batch.

When i first started, the recipe seemed similar to sugar cookies, but as i went on I realized that it was actually going to be closer to modern day biscuits.


How Accurate Is It?: More accurate than I would have liked. In the future I would cook these with baking soda as the pearlash is scary to use and I don't feel comfortable serving foods that contain it. 

I've really wanted to try a recipe with potash or pearlash to see how differently they acted from modern day equivalents. It was fairly similar. It does have a "taste" but so does baking soda if you put too much in. Can't wait to see what everyone else makes for this challenge!

Historical Food Fortnightly-Literary Foods: Anne of Green Gables Nut Cake

I am excited to be taking part in the Historical Food Fortnightly! If you haven't heard about it, go over and check it out.

The Challenge: "Literary Foods June 1 - June 14 "Food is described in great detail in much of the literature of the past. Make a dish that has been mentioned in a work of literature, based on historical documentation about that food item."


For this challenge, I decided to make the nut cake with pink icing and walnuts from Anne of Avonlea. It was a hard decision, I was considering making something from Les Miserables or Wuthering Heights as they were both books where food played a major role in the plot.  But I Love the Anne of Green Gables series and wanted to make this cake a few years back but hadn't gotten around to it.

In Anne of Avonlea, Anne accidentally sells the wrong cow for  Mr. Harrison's and offers him a cake she baked to apologize.

"Poor Anne got her hat and her twenty dollars and was passing out when she happened to glance through the open pantry door. On the table reposed a nut cake which she had baked that morning. . .a particularly toothsome concoction iced with pink icing and adorned with walnuts. Anne had intended it for Friday evening, when the youth of Avonlea were to meet at Green Gables to organize the Improvement Society. But what were they compared to the justly offended Mr. Harrison? Anne thought that cake ought to soften the heart of any man, especially one who had to do his own cooking, and she promptly popped it into a box. She would take it to Mr. Harrison as a peace offering."

 

The Recipe:

 

The Date/Year and Region: 1902, Northeast US

How Did You Make It: 

Ingredients:
- 1/2 Cup Butter
- 1 1/2 Cups Sugar
- 3/4 Cup Milk
- 2 Cups Sifted Flour
- 2 Teaspoons Baking Powder (Rollings Reliable Recommended)
- 4 Egg Whites, beaten stiff
- 1 Cup Hickory Nuts, ground 
 
Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Sift the Baking Powder and the Flour together in a medium sized mixing bowl, add the ground nuts. In a separate bowl, cream the Butter into the Sugar add the Milk. When thoroughly mixed add the Butter mixture into the Flour mixture and add the Egg Whites. Grease and Flour 2 9 inch loaf pans. Bake for 60 minutes or until a toothpick comes out of the center clean.
For the glaze: Mix 1 1/2 Cups of Powdered Sugar with a Tablespoon of Vanilla and enough hot Water to form a stiff paste. Spread on the cake once cooled.

 

Time to Complete: 1 1/2 Hours with baking time included.

Total Cost:  I already had flour, sugar, baking powder, vanilla, food coloring, and eggs on hand. I had to buy the walnuts, butter and powdered sugar, which came to about $8.00.

 

How Successful Was It?: It looked good and tasted better than I thought it would. The cake is dense but the sugar frosting made it very tasty. "Toothsome" was the word for this.

How Accurate Is It?: I did not use hickory nuts as they are impossible to find in stores and the trees here don't have nuts yet. I substituted walnuts instead.  

I had a lot of fun making this and can't wait to see what everyone else is making.  

18th Century Altoids: A Recipe from the 1790s and Beyond

The current day mints that we call Altoids have a long history. The recipe dates back at least to the 1780s, and were called peppermint lozenges. Peppermint lozenges were originally thought to cure upset stomachs. They were created as a convenient substitution for peppermint water which was used previously.     

By the early 1800s, doctors and chemists attest to the popularity of lozenges and mention the additional flavors of ginger and horehound.[1] By the 1860s, authors mention many additives such as liquorish, anise, black currant, cayenne, rose, lavender, rhubarb as well as others, including quinine.[2] 

They became popular as both medicine and candy throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. In modern times, there are few candies that have stuck with this simple recipe. Altoids is the most prominent company making them today. Their history with the recipe dates back to one of the early big producers in the 1780s, Smith and Co. who dubbed their brand of peppermint lozenges Altoids, but they weren't sold in the United States until the 20th century. The recipe remains very similar today.  [3]
 
 

Peppermint Lozenges

Ingredients:

- 16 oz Powdered Sugar + more for dusting
- 2 oz Gum Arabic, Gum Tragacanth or Tylose (more common in modern baking)
-Peppermint Oil
-Food Coloring

Instructions:

Mix sugar, gum and water in a bowl. If making one flavor, about 15 or so drops of oil and coloring can be added during the mixing process. If making multiple flavors, make the dough first and knead in the colors and flavors later. Let sit for 15 minutes. Roll out on a powdered sugar or cornstarched surface and cut shapes with a small cutter or large straw.  
Sprinkle your hands, workspace and rolling pin with powdered sugar or cornstarch.

***Alternatively, Modern gum paste can be bought and used as it has changed very little in recipe, most are a mixture of sugar and some type of gum. Many modern recipes for gum paste are also available online.
 

 

---

[1] Chamberlaine, W.. "Mr. Chamberlaine, on the Ammendments of the Medicine Act." In The Medical and Physical Journal, . London: Richard Phillips, 1803.

[2] Weatherley, Henry. A treatise on the art of boiling sugar, crystallizing, lozenge-making, comfits, gum goods, and

 other processes for confectionery, etc.: in which are explained, in an easy and familiar manner, the various methods of manufacturing every description of raw and refined sugar goods, as sold by the trade, confectioners, and others. Philadelphia: H.C. Baird, 1865.

[3] Altoids® (Wrigley.com) http://www.wrigley.com/global/brands/altoids.aspx

Preserving Leftover Herbs

     Many people grow their own herbs and can't use it all, those who buy their fresh herbs normally find that they bought way too much for their uses.  If you have lots of leftover herbs, you can preserve them by freezing them into ice cubes. It is economical and tastes just as good as fresh herbs.    
    The "herb cubes" can be added directly to your food while cooking it. It tastes fresh and is easy to cook with. Herbs such as mint, basil, parsley and tarragon freeze nicely. If you use mint, you can add cubes of mint to lemonade in the summer or you could make herb mixtures such as a "spaghetti sauce" mix of herbs.

 Take an ice cube tray or other container, I use a plastic chocolate mold, the size of each cube is a lot smaller than a normal ice cube tray ice cubes and is a good size for a big pot of spaghetti. (I've been trying to find a mold that will make little squares the size of dice.)







Wash and dry the herb. Chop it up into fine pieces (or big ones if you like chunks in your cooking.) You could also use a food processor if you are making large quantities.





Place herb pieces in tray.






Add just enough water or olive oil to keep the leaves together. Place in freezer and make sure the family knows whats in there and not to knock it over. Once they are frozen, tap the tray down on a plate and put the homemade herb cubes into freezer bags or labeled plastic food containers and keep them in the freezer until you need them. Enjoy!