Dish: To Make Pepper Cakes That Will Keep Good in Ye House for a Quarter or Halfe A Year
Country of Origin: America! USA! USA! U! S! A! ... but in a more technical sense Britain.
Year: late 1600s
Source: Martha Washington's cookbook, via Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats by Karen Hess.
Woooo! America! Am I right, folks? What better way to celebrate the Fourth of July than by taking a lesson from the first First Lady herself, Martha Washington. Her family cookbook has been reprinted as Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats, with helpful annotations by Karen Hess.
I was hunting through it for a good Independence Day dish. I considered for a moment "A Made Dish," but this turned out to be essentially french toast, and while this might be a day for FREEDOM TOAST, if I made french toast it might just surrender to some Nazi toast and then it'd be up to Ol' Uncle Sam to swoop in and rescue its ass. Amiright? USA! USA! USA!
Instead I decided to make pepper cakes because I haven't yet tried making a baked good for this blog, and there was also the intriguing claim that they would last me a "quarter to halfe a year." And that's just good American workmanship. Here is the recipe:
Take treacle 4 pound, fine wheat flowre halfe a peck, beat ginger 2 ounces, coriander seeds 2 ounces, caraway & annyseeds of each an ounce, suckets slyced in small pieces a pretty quantity, powder of orring pills one ounce. Worke all these into paste, and let it ly 2 or 3 hours. After, make it up into what fashions you please in pretty large cakes about an intch and halfe thick at moste, or rather an intch will be thick enough. Wash your cakes over with a little oyle and treacle mixt together befor you set them into ye oven, then set them in after household bread. & though they be hard baked, they will give againe, when you have occasion to use it, slice it and serve it up.
Rock. Flag. Eagle.
SUBSTITUTIONS AND NOTES ON INGREDIENTS
1) Treacle: is molasses.
2) Caraway Seeds: I couldn't find these, but I know them to have a flavor very similar to anise seed, so I just doubled the amount of anise.
3) Suckets: Suckets are candied citrus peels, popular in Elizabethan England, and beyond. Since not many stores sell suckets these days (despite their obvious marketing potential as Suck-itz) I had to make my own. More about this in the "cooking" section.
4) Powder of Orring Pill: Orange peel powder seems to me another ingredient that has fallen out of popularity. I figured I would try to recreate this taste by making my suckets out of orange peel.
COOKING
This recipe was sort of a two-in-one, because I had to make suckets before I could make the pepper cakes. I found an old recipe online, but also a nearly identical modern recipe for candied orange peel. Since the biggest difference between the two was that the modern recipe listed precise quantities, I figured I would follow that. It was a simple process:
(1) Boil the peels three times to reduce bitterness,
(2) Boil them in sugar and water for about an hour
(3) Roll them in powdered sugar.
Unsurprisingly, the suckets by themselves taste sweet and orangey, with a little bit of bitterness. By themselves I thought they tasted pretty okay (and I've kept the extras to snack on when I have a bit of a sweet tooth).
With my suckets done, I was ready to make the cakes themselves. The process seemed pretty easy; all I really had to do was mix the ingredients together. My biggest change in the recipe was to reduce the obscene quantities listed here. One peck of flour is about 16 cups. That's going to make a lot of cakes. I reduced all the quantites to 1/8 of the listed amount, yielding what seemed to me pretty workable proportions:
2/3 c. molasses2 c. whole wheat pastry flour3/4 T. ginger3/4 T. coriander3/4 T. anise seed~ 6 T. suckets
These cakes are essentially spiced gingerbread, but with some interesting omissions. There's no liquid aside from the molasses itself, no leavening agent, and no eggs. Considering all this, it's not surprising that mixing these ingredients together made a thiiiiiick, thick paste. It resisted stirring, and when I let it sit, it clung stubbornly to one side of the bowl.
Yum?
You may notice these pepper cakes have no pepper in them. Hess writes that similar recipes of the period do sometimes include pepper, so it may have been an accidental omission. It's possible that Mrs. Washington left it out, but could our founding mother have been so careless? USA!? USA!? USA!? I decided to cover my bases and make some cakes with pepper and some cakes without. I massaged about a half teaspoon of pepper into three of them.
The three in the back are the peppery ones.
After applying my oil-molasses glaze, I baked at 350 until the cakes seemed to harden on the outside (about 15 minutes).
THE TASTING
Pepperless Pepper Cakes: Pretty good. Considering how much molasses and anise are in here, I was surprised to find that the predominant flavor was actually the orange peel. In the end the sweetness, anise flavor, and orange flavor blended quite nicely. My girlfriend, Laura, thought that there were too many suckets to keep these things in the enjoyable range. While I agree that I put too much in, I think the cakes are still palatable, and that the mixture of anise and orange is a pleasant blending
Some of the glaze ran off and hardened on the baking sheet. These crispy bits were delicious, and had a very satisfying texture (though I don't think that was an intentional part of the recipe). The texture of the cake as a whole is, predictably, a little tough, but I'd bet that's what lets it last "a quarter to halfe a year." A visiting friend, Alex, also sampled the cakes. He liked the suckets less than I did, and does not like the taste of anise. Upon trying a bite of the finished cake, his face crinkled with what I would call "disgustappointment." Suffice to say he was less than enamored of them.
That's right. It's a creepily sexualized Obama emerging from
a sea of roses while a white stallion prances in the background.
Peppered Pepper Cakes: I probable put too much pepper in these. They tasted surprisingly spicy (once again, wussy black pepper is doing some heavy lifting). Alex liked these even less, claiming that he doesn't like his desserts to burn him. But I guess if widdow baby can't handle his gingowbwead he can just move to CANADA!... USA! USA! USA! (editor's note: my copyeditor (again Laura) thought this wasn't very nice. You know what else wasn't very nice? Vietnam! THESE COLORS DON'T RUN!)
As an additional experiment, I will also be testing Ol' Martha's claim that these will last me 3 - 6 months. I will be saving at least one of these and sampling part of it in October, and the rest in January. We'll see how the taste compares in 2010.
Overall Consensus: Tasty, but nowhere near perfect. I'm docking a few points for the tough texture, and the overwhelming taste of the suckets.
Final Grades:
Pepperless Cakes: B-
Peppered Cakes: C
America: A++++++++, times infinity.
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