Caraway seed cake Caraway seed cake Seed cake is a traditional British cake flavoured with caraway or other flavourful seeds. Caraway seeds have been long used in British cookery, and at one time caraway-seed biscuits were prepared to mark the end of the sowing of the spring wheat. These particular biscuits later evolved into this distinctively flavoured tea cake. James Matterer reports that recipes for seed cake are found in A.W.'s "Book of Cookrye" (1591) and "The English Huswife" by Gervase Markham (1615). The cake was popular in the 1700s, and through the Victorian era. Recipes for it are included in many early
Lardy cake dripping cake. There is some dispute as to which area of England recorded the original recipe. In Hampshire a form of the cake was made without currants and it can still be bought in the county and neighbouring Sussex. Versions of the cake are also baked in the West Country particularly in Gloucestershire, Wiltshire. These are areas of England where pig farming (of which lard is a product) has traditionally been a mainstay of the agricultural economy. Despite contemporary concerns about high-calorie, high-fat foods, it is still widely eaten, appearing on the menu at the Royal United Hospital, Bath and