Porter Cake: A Short & Incomplete Look Into Its Origins ...

Porter cake - a quintessential Irish product that has been baked in Ireland for as long as we have had porter here, Correct? So surely it was being baked in every big house and small home in Ireland for almost 300 years give or take a few decades?

Or has it?

I ended up down a small rabbit hole of porter cake research while looking for information on porter barm bread, a different product where the barm - or yeast - from a porter brew was used to make a flour mixture rise prior to baking. Porter cake is a different thing - rich, fruity and dark more of a ‘proper’ cake than a bread, even if the words and meaning did - and do - overlap.

The curious thing is that I can find no mention of something called porter cake until very late in the 19th century. This is not to say that there was not a cake that had porter poured into the mix, or that there was not something called 'Porter Cake' before this date it just means that I have not found such a reference. In truth I would be fairly sure that the habit existed in some scale somewhere not long after porter’s creation.

But that first recipe I can find is in from a London publication called The Queen: The Lady's Newspaper published in 1897 where a reader called 'Heather' had written into the publication inquiring about a recipe for porter cake. The editor was unaware of such a recipe but some other readers seem to have sent her a recipe which she printed:

Rub 4oz. of butter into 1lb. of flour, then mix in ½lb. well washed and dried currants, the same of sultanas or stoned raisins, two teaspoons of mixed spice, the finely grated rind of one lemon, a teaspoonful of carbonate of soda on to which has been poured quarter pint of heated porter, and four eggs broken, not beaten, into the mixture. Beat together for twenty minutes then bake for three hours in a slow oven, to be kept three days before use, in an airtight tin.

Other variations were adding a little candied peel instead of lemon zest, or adding 2 oz. of almonds to the mix.

Notice anything missing...?

Sugar.

I am not sure if it was not a part of the recipe, which I would find a little unlikely, or if it was just omitted from the printed recipe? I suspect the latter. Also breaking 4 eggs into heated porter sound a bit suspect, although we should probably just read it as warm instead of hot.

The next I can find is in The Northern Weekly Gazette published in the north of England in 1907, which carries another recipe that is quite different from the one above but at least contains sugar this time:

½ lb. of butter, ½ lb. lard, 1 nutmeg, 1 teaspoonful of salt, 1lb. of currants, 1 gill of porter, ½ lb. lemon peel, 1lb. sugar, 5 eggs, 1 egg powder; cream [the] butter and lard together, mix eggs and porter; beat well, then add the other ingredients and bake in a slow oven for 3½ or 4 hours.

That recipe was from a Mrs. Henry Carwell in Coudon near Bishop Auckland close to where the newspaper was published. Just nutmeg in that one for a spice addition.

But what is missing from this one…?

Yes, flour!

I am really at a loss at these omissions unless I am missing something in each recipe, as I am not a baker – although they have been transcribed and checked correctly.

The very same paper in 1913 carries a different recipe:

One pound of flour, ½lb of raisins, ½ lb. of currants, ½ a lb. of mixed peel, ¾ lb. of brown sugar, ½ lb of butter, 2 teaspoonfuls of spice, 4 eggs, 1 teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda, 1 pint bottle of porter. Rub the butter into the flour, mix all the dry ingredients, beat up the eggs in a basin, make the porter lukewarm, and pour on to the eggs and beat well; add all to the mixture, beat all together for twenty minutes, pour into greased tins, and bake in a moderate oven for 1½ hours.

That recipe is very like the first one from 1897, with a few small changes and added sugar this time - and it contains flour! It was sent in by a Miss M. E. Jackson in Kirky Stephen, Westmoreland again northern England.

In 1929 an advertisement (image above) for Robex brand self-raising flour in The Bedfordshire Times gives the following recipe:

½ lb. Robex Self-Raising Flour, 6ozs. brown sugar, 4 ozs. marg, 4 ozs. currants, 2 ozs. sultanas, 3 ozs. large raisins, 2 ozs. mixed peel, 1 teaspoon mixed spice, 2 eggs, grated rind ½ l2mon, 1 gill porter. Cream marg and sugar, warm porter, pour over cream mixture along with flour and beaten eggs. Beat thoroughly, stir in ingredients. Bake in greased and floured tin for 1½ hours.

Next we can now finally skip over the Irish Sea to the north of Ireland and The Belfast News-Letter of November 1930, which carries the following:

Here is a recipe for fruit cake suitable for Christmas which will keep for 6 weeks. It is called porter cake, and you will require 10ozs. butter, 1lb. flour, 4 eggs, ¾ lb. moist brown sugar, ½ lb. of raisins, ½ lb currants, ¼ lb. candied peel, ¼ pound cherries, grated rind of 1 lemon, 2ozs. almonds, 2 teaspoonfuls mixed spice, 1 teaspoonful baking soda, and 1 small bottle porter. Sift the flour and spice together. Cut and rub in the butter until like breadcrumbs. then add sugar, prepared currants, raisins, chopped peel, cherries, and 3/f of the blanched and chopped almonds. Beat eggs until frothy. Heat the porter until tepid; then stir it into the baking soda. Stir this into the eggs, pour all into the dry ingredients. Mix and beat for at least 10 minutes. Then pour into a prepared tin and bake in a moderate oven for 3 to 3½ hours. When the cake has been in the oven for 15 or 20 minutes sprinkle the rest of the almonds over the top. Keep at least a week before cutting this cake.

The tone of the opening sentences makes it sound like this is a new and unknown recipe - or at least uncommon. [Edit: I found a similar recipe in the same newspaper one year earlier in 1929.]

There are a few other recipes after that, mostly in the north of Ireland and it then appears to spread around the country during the following decades, no doubt aided by a recipe in Maura Laverty's Cookbook/Kind Cooking first published in 1946.

(Incidentally, a 'Stout Cake' puts in an appearance in 1932 in the London edition of The People newspaper with a similar if simpler recipe to those above, and there are a few escaped recipes showing up in publications in New Zealand and Australia too.)

I am certainly not stating as fact that there is not an older history of porter cake in Ireland, I am just saying that I cannot find it right now. However, there is some evidence however circumstantial that the recipe was first used in England before travelling across the sea to the north of Ireland and then spreading to the entire Island - and beyond – but no real proof.

Unrelated of course, but we have precedence for this in the word 'Crack', which travelled the same path before becoming the faux-Irish 'Craic'!

I would love to track the recipe back farther; I have just used the online sources that I can access, as well as some of the old cookery books in my collection, so please do get in touch if you can find an earlier recipe - which I have no doubt exists somewhere, perhaps under a different name.

Liam K.

All written content and the research involved in publishing it here is my own unless otherwise stated and cannot be reproduced elsewhere without permission, full credit to its sources, and a link back to this post. Newspaper image © The British Library Board - All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk) from whom I have received permission to display this image on this site.

Food History: Breaking Bread - A Lost Custom in Ireland?

Food history is not a topic I write about much but it is certainly something that interests me, and occasionally I come across a story or reference that is intriguing enough to want me to share it to a wider audience.

A little while back I came across an article from January 1852 with wonderful images in the Illustrated London News regarding an old baking custom in Ireland that for the most part seems to have disappeared, apart from the odd mention in lists of traditions from around the festive period or the occasional reference to something vaguely similar that people still do spotted on social media or elsewhere.

Instead of waffling on about it too much here I will just transcribe the article for you to make of what you will from it, or use as a reference point if you ever spot it being mentioned or hear about it in other circumstances.

The Baking and Breaking of the New Year’s Eve Cake - A Christmas Custom in Ireland

(From a Correspondent)

This fine old festival, whose origin is lost amidst the Pagan darkness that surrounds so many of the customs of this country, and yet rendered dear to its inhabitants by the joyous association of childhood, like the many other, is now passing away not only from the practice, but also from the recollection, of the people; yet they delight to talk of those times when the worthy good man, either in ‘the big house’ or ‘comfortable homestead’ made known to his cherished friends and humble dependents that the ‘lady of the house’ or ‘the good woman’ was to have her New Year's Eve cake; And the sly invitation was sure to gather all who cherished genuine wit and humour to witness the making of the cake - that important portion of the meal - to enjoy the drollery of him and her installed as high priest and to stage the requisite incantations to secure the success of the charmed cake. This, having been once fairly placed on the griddle (in those days our forefathers knew little of the oven for such uses), became an object of interest more than one, and many were the sly coleens who, when the lad of her choice placed in the fire a sprig of the still verdant holly or Ivy that decorated the kitchen, would adroitly steal in another little sprig to the blazing pile, to see if her fortune burned and kept pace with his; if it did so, (like the burnt nuts of All-Hallows eve) a smooth current of happiness for the coming year was indicated.

Those were, indeed, days of simplicity, when the Baron and the peasant met alike under the same roof; when even the humble itinerant fiddler who played his way through the country was expected to witness the next aspirant to manhood lay hold of the well-made and substantial cake, and, with his mimic strength, dash against the door, when it was shivered to pieces, while the assembled witnesses of the scene offered up in spirit an humbled but fervent prayer that cold, want, or hunger might not enter that door for the ensuing year. The fragments of the cake were then scrambled for, and certain was he or she who succeeded in securing the first fragment that touched the ground, that they, too, would have a home and a New Year's Cake ere the next year was out.

To this succeeded a scene of romping, eating and drinking, dancing and singing, such as can only be witnessed in Ireland; And the mirth continues up to the hour that marks our passage from one year into another, when a fervent prayer is offered up to Him who has brought us thus to a new year, and enabled us to see the light of another.

We recollect, when a schoolboy, thinking with delight over our promised enjoyment of a New Year's Cake, and of all our school fellows having the same promise of enjoyment held out to them; whereas we believe that the practice is now only carried out in the more comfortable and wealthy homes of the South and Midland counties of poor old Ireland.

It is a tradition that was certainly lost to me until recently - and there are another couple in there too regarding the burning of holly and nuts. The wording is a bit difficult in places to our modern ears given the language, grammar, and syntax of the middle of the 19th century but I am sure you get the gist of the tradition; the baking of bread/cake in a griddle pan, and it then being smashed against the door by a son in the household for luck, with an extra dose of fortune for the person who got the first piece to hit the ground.

Anyone up for it?

Liam

All written content and the research involved in publishing it here is my own unless otherwise stated and cannot be reproduced elsewhere without permission, full credit to its source, and a link back to this post.

Newspaper images are © The British Library Board - All rights reserved. With thanks to The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk) from whom I have received permission to display these images on this site.