It shouldn’t be a surprise that all of us here at the Pink Palace of the Bitchery are fans of The Great British Bake Off. I am most put out that the only complete seasons I can get through mostly legal means are Series 5, which is on American Netflix as Season 1 (because that was the first season PBS aired), and Series 1, which is on Youtube. There are bits and pieces of other seasons on YouTube, but many of those have been taken down.
Anyway, one of the delights of the first season is the blurbs they do discussing the history of the various things that the bakers will be baking. And in the episode about cakes, they discuss the first example of something we would recognize as a modern cake.
Basically, they waved a red flag at me and I went “I HAVE TO MAKE THIS FOR THE BITCHERY IT IS A MORAL IMPERATIVE.” So I did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6CcSpAHYsw&list=PLC5_7oq-VsUlFtGFuErZyVNesIYx5GT8z&index=15
The recipe comes from a 1615 book on cookery and household management called The English Housewife by Gervase Markham. He says he did not write the recipes but that the book is an “…approved Manuscript which he happily light[ed] on, belonging sometime to an honorable Personage of this kingdome, who was singular amongst those of her ranke for many of the qualities here set forth.”
Naturally, the name of the lady in question has been erased in favor of the dude who took her words.
Not gonna lie, this recipe was one of the concrete reasons that I bought a kitchen scale.
“To Make bisket bread, take a pound of fine flour, and a pound of sugar finely beated and searsed, and mix them together, and take eight eggs & put four yelks, and beat them together, then strew in your flower & sugar as you are beating of it, by a little at once, it will take near an hours beating; then take half an ounce of Annisseeds and coriander seeds and let them be dried and rubbed very clean, and put them in. Then rub your bisket-pans with cold sweet butter as thin as you can, and so put it in, and bake it in an oven…”
(The recipe further discusses what to do to make “cakes” which are actually more like small cookies, but I am not transcribing that bit, because that’s not what I did. I made the “bisket bread” bit.)
So there’s a couple of interesting things to note, here. First, the order of operations is still the same even now: take your dry ingredients, mix them together, and take your wet ingredients and mix THEM together, and then slowly add your dry ingredients to your wet ingredients. (In high school, I took a cooking home ec class, and I remember one of the dudebros hollering at a dudebro buddy of his, “HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING? YOU ALWAYS ADD THE FLOUR A LITTLE BIT AT A TIME. Now your cookies are gonna SUCK.”)
Second: generally, most people agree that “take eight eggs & put four yelks” means “Eight whites and four yolks.” I also chose to use medium eggs, since eggs have gotten bigger with the advent of modern farming methods.
Third: the base is three ingredients – flour, eggs, sugar. A starch, a sweetener, and a binder. There’s no fat, and more interestingly, there’s no chemical leavening. But there is leavening- air. It’s why you beat this sucker for an HOUR.
So:
One pound of sugar, one pound of flour. Mix ’em up.
Put your varied egg bits in the bowl (remove the shell shards that feel in there), beat them.
Make sure said bowl is for the KitchenAid, because beating batter for an hour by hand seems unnecessarily silly when one has a KitchenAid. Start KitchenAid and slowly add the flour and sugar. Let Kitchenaid go for a while.
Check it after about half an hour, and note the motor is quite warm. Switch to the bread hook and let it go for another ten minutes or so, then shrug and go, “Well, 40 minutes by KitchenAid is a reasonable facsimile of an hour by hand, since the KitchenAid rhythm never changed, nor did it get tired or bored.”
Now, the spices: I actually don’t like the taste of anise at all. But I am in the, “Don’t refuse to try it at least once just because you think it’s icky (no, not even if you KNOW it’ll be icky because you know what anise tastes like)” camp. I decided to split the batter into two, and put the anise and coriander in a much smaller one. (I stand by this decision.)
(Yes, both pans are buttered.)
Now, the recipe just says, “put into an oven.” No sense of temp, no time, just… “you know, bake it.” The most common baking temp is 350-375, and if you’re not sure, you will probably be okay going with that.
I went with 300 because…. it seemed like a good idea at the time? I honestly don’t know why I chose that number. It worked though. I baked the little one for about 25 minutes and the bigger one for almost 45, checking every ten minutes or so.
Look at how much they rose!
The anise was too anise-y for me. I mean, any anise is too much anise, but other people I inflicted it upon (who like anise, weird people) loved it. And it did smell good! The anise I think overpowered the coriander. I know at least one person who got a piece is a regular commentator, so I hope she’ll give a review. (Even if it’s “Red, what the actual fuck did you feed me.”)
The texture is a bit odd – it’s stiff (as you would expect to find in eggs that have been beaten for a while, and without fat to make it more tender) and dense and chewy. It’s good, but I wanted to add vanilla and other delicate flavors to give it some more depth. But as an early step in the development of cake as we know it, it’s really good.
Now I’m gonna go get a cupcake.
This sounds like a precursor to pound cake. I’d suggest trying it again using eight whole eggs plus four yolks. It’s going to add more fat to your recipe since a medium egg yolk would be the equivalent of about one tablespoon of oil. If the recipe intended egg whites plus yolks, the wording would be something along the lines of taking eight eggs and holding back or removing four yolks. There’s also the minor detail that the Colonial pound cake recipe I have calls for eight whole eggs with a mixing time of an hour. The updated notes point out that the prolonged mixing time not only incorporates air, but it also gives the sugar crystals time to melt a little.
I’m guessing a lot of recipes back then were basically, eh, cook it until you think it’s done.
Would they have used star anise? I’ve always assumed that they would have ued aniseed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anise because it would have een more easily available. I’d never heard of star anis until I got into chiese cooking in the eighties, whereas aniseed was around in my childhood in the sixties. Not that I like the stuff either!
I can never decouple anise from “anisette toast” which was the only cookie ever found in the bread box in my parents house when I was growing up. They dunked it in coffee, kind of like a wan biscotti…
But cardamom I can get behind. I’ve got a recipe for 18th century cardamom orange flower water cookies that Kimberly Walters (A Book of Cookery By a Lady) developed. It’s really good. I’m going to share it later this month. She baked them in a bake kettle in an open hearth, but she provides times and temps for modern ovens.
Yes, they would have used aniseed, but star anise was $1 and in my grocery store, and according to Andrew Dalby in Dangerous Tastes, the taste is pretty much the same.
I tasted both of these and the anise one was GOOD–do not listen to Red’s anti-anise prejudice.
The texture is somewhere between sponge cake and scone. The egg yolks provide plenty of fat, so it wasn’t hard and dense, but it also wasn’t light and airy like modern cake. The plain cake was… plain, like a sugar cookie is plain. And it was about as sweet as a sugar cookie without frosting. The anise cake was better because it had a little flavor.
However, it’s interesting that the flour and sugar were mixed and then added to the batter. Usually (meaning in my favorite cake recipes) you beat the eggs, add the sugar (so it can dissolve better), mix the crap out of it, and only then add the flour. I would never think of beating ANYTHING cake-like for 30+ minutes after adding the flour because that develops the gluten or something. I wonder how the recipe would turn out if you beat the eggs and sugar for 40 minutes, then folded in the flour and flavorings?
PS: Congrats on the kitchen scale!!! Best thing you can buy for the baking, aside from that beast of a KitchenAid mixer.
This seems very similar to the sponge cake recipe I use to make “sopa borracha”, a rum-soaked cousin to bread pudding. Mine requires beating the egg whites to the stiff peaks stage, then add in the beaten yolks, and finally the flour and sugar mix. No leavening but air. It’s a bit dry and chewy, which makes it ideal for soaking with flavored syrup and booze.
Thanks RHG, I can tolerate star anis used to give a hint of flavour then taken out of things, I’d be hard pressed to explean the difference, but it is better than anis to my taste.
Caroline Linden – I wonder how much gluten there was in flour at that point in England? In general present day English ‘soft’ wheats have a lot less gluten than american hard wheats. You still need to be careful about the difference between what we would just call flour and use for everything except yeast cakes, bread and choux, and what you would I think call all-purpose flour which has a lot more gluten and could be used for breadmaking … It’s probable that there was even less gluten in English flour then than now.
Well, I love you because you told me that the Great British Bake-Off has a whole season on Youtube. There goes my Saturday…
Jazzlet: I don’t know! I was thinking of cake flour, which is lower in protein (looked it up–that’s the important thing, not gluten), and I still wouldn’t beat it with a mixer for 40 minutes! But mixing by hand is definitely less vigorous, too.
Caroline: ummmm gluten is protein! Hence the really weird product seitan – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_gluten_%28food%29 It’s one of those things that as a meat eater I find pointless, a lot of effort for something that is not very like meat; it does have far more texture than any of the other traditional meat substitues. And it is bland so you can add whatever flavours you like.
But I agree that beating any flour that much would be ‘interesting’ as my English teacher taught us (for use when something sounds horrid, but one doesn’t wish to be rude!).
Chocolate work? You mean, it’s not just unwrapping the bar and eating it? I haven’t been able to watch the show beyond Netflix’s offering, so this was a most enjoyable 58:32 spent today. Now I have to find the other episodes. Thanks!
@Darlynne: Psssst: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaz1BevJePy9F2slz3ErY-w/videos
This is so cool. I adore this feature and the excerpts from the historic receipts and the play by play photos. Thank you for doing this. Also, I don’t like anise either. I just like this feature so much. I geek out over it. And now must scrabble to Netflix to find this British baking show you speak of.
I’m so glad you like it!
On Netflix, it’s called The Great British Baking Show (“Bake Off” is trademarked by Pillsbury, so they can’t use it). It’s so soothing and lovely and after you’ve binged the season, come back and we’ll discuss BinGate.
I keep reading this as Brisket Bread. I’m enjoying the link as I’ve been hearing about this show for awhile now.
bev I now have visions of brisket cooked on bread …
Oh my god BinGate! I almost cried! That poor man. I caught part of a season while I was living in Singapore and I was very confused to move back home and find such limited access. It isn’t lively way to spend a few hours in Britain. Can we start a petition?