This is the second post featuring a recipe from the Earl of Roden Commonplace Book held at the Scripps College, Denison Library. Read the first post here for information about this manuscript.
Reader, do you cook with baking soda or baking powder? I bet you do. Twenty-first-century recipes for cake, cookies, breakfast breads, and pancakes (I could go on) are predominantly leavened with sodium bicarbonate. Joy the Baker explains how, why, and when to use baking soda or baking powder in this excellent Baking 101 post.
That squat cylinder or cardboard box full of white powder in your kitchen cabinet is the product of a culinary revolution. In the last decades of the eighteenth century chemists produced the sodium bicarbonate compound for the first time. By the early nineteenth century, “soda” begins to appear with some frequency in culinary recipes. The breakfast chapter in Abigail Carroll’s Three Squares suggests that baking soda transformed American breakfast traditions in the nineteenth century. (Hear her talk about baking soda and more on this episode of the wonderful podcast Gastropod.)
Before the discovery and popularity of baking soda, vigorously whisking eggs or leaving a yeast-laden mix to rise were the primary methods for producing leavened baked goods. All this took a lot more effort than spooning something else into your dry ingredients mix. We’ve been working with pre-baking soda leavening methods from the very start of this project. For example, in the recipe for Potingall/Portugal Cakes whisked eggs add the fluff factor. The recipe for Oven Cakes calls for yeast and rising time. “Soda Cake” is the second recipe I prepared from the Earl of Roden Commonplace book and it’s the first recipe calling for baking soda, or “Soda (Carbonate),” I’ve come across during the course of this project. Many of the recipes in this manuscript were copied in the early nineteenth century and our compiler was decidedly on trend with this spicy, soda-leavened breakfast bread.
The Recipe
1 Lb of Flour 3 Oz of butter 3 Oz of Lard 1/2 lb of moist sugar
2 Tea spoons full of Soda (Carbonate) 2 Eggs and a little
Milk make it about the thickness of Cream a few
carraway seeds 1/2 a teaspoonful of ground Alspice.
Our Recipe
The ingredients in the original recipe are relatively straightforward (at least now that we’ve discussed the origins and significance of baking soda), but the recipe does not provide any instructions for preparation. To develop a method, I took a look at my mother and grandmother’s Irish Soda Bread recipe in my own handwritten recipe notebook. Following the basic method from my family’s recipe, I began by combining the butter/lard with the dry ingredients and then added the eggs and milk to form a dough.
1 lb flour
1/2 lb sugar (or brown sugar)
2 t baking soda
1/2 t salt (I didn’t use any, but I think it needs some.)
1/2 t caraway seeds
1/2 t allspice
3 oz butter
3 oz lard (or substitute butter)
2 eggs
6 T milk
Preheat your oven to 325 F.
Mix flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, and spices in a large bowl. Add the butter and lard to this dry mix. Cut the butter into small cubes and work into the dry ingredients by hand or using a pastry cutter. The mix should resemble a coarse meal. Add the eggs and milk. Stir until a sticky dough forms. Shape into a round loaf and place on a baking sheet. Cut across the top with a sharp knife.
Bake at 325 F for about 40 min.
The Results
Soda Cake is dense, sweet, and spicy. The baking soda certainly did its job and the texture is like a substantial muffin. The spices give this cake a unique flavor. Next time, I might put some seeds on the top for crunch and add some salt to the mix to deepen the flavors.
Cooking in the Archives 
What does ‘moist sugar’ mean? Anything of significance?
Great question! I think moist sugar might have been what we now call “brown sugar.” If I’d had any in my house. Would have used it instead of standard sugar (and I included it in the recipe as an alternate.) We’ve seen a lot of different adjectives linked to sugar in these recipes: fine, scraped, loaf, moist. Sugar was processed, packaged, transported, and sold in a variety of forms over the centuries we cover on this blog.
The question about “moist sugar” It should be noted that at the time the original cookbook was written sugar was generally not the snow white sand that we think of today that we shovel into our coffee. In general it was a lot less unrefined. In general the molasses had not been removed or had been partially removed. As a result Moist Sugar has a deep, rich brown color that is darker than most store-bought brown sugars. The closes sugars on store shelves to ‘Moist Sugar’ are ‘Barbatos Sugar’ or ‘Muscovado Sugar’.
Moist Sugar is slightly coarser with and has a bit more stickier texture than what commercial light or dark Brown sugars found on the shelves of your local grocery store today, additionally it has a slightly more complex flavor profile. However for all practical purposes It can be substituted in any recipe that calls for it with brown sugar. If you would like to create a substitute for moist sugar use 1 cup of Turbinado sugar (I give mine a short pulse or three in a food processor to get a granule slightly bigger or to the size of granulated sugar and 2 tablespoons of molasses (I use a mix of different types of molasses depending on what I am baking or cooking but for baking sorghum molasses generally works well.) Another substitute for Moist Sugar that my Aunt uses is 1 cup dark brown sugar to which she combines 1/2 to 3/4 tablespoon of molasses.
The recipe says to “make it about the thickness of cream.” So, shouldn’t it be made thinner and baked in a tin?