New Year’s Cakes (1871)

These delicious little New Year’s Cakes are such a sweet way to welcome family and friends that come to call on New Year’s Day!

Dear friends ~

I do hope you had a wonderful Christmas!

These newsletters haven’t been coming out on schedule, as I’ve been in Christmas vacation mode with my kids. It’s an extra long one this year, but nobody’s complaining! Add a good ice storm and internet outage in there, and it’s been a very off-line time, which has been honestly quite lovely. 

I did want to send you this wonderful old recipe for New Year’s Cakes in time for the holiday though, in case you’d like to try them! They’re small and cut out, so these days we’d tend to call them cookies. They’re puffy and cake-like though, so calling them cakes does seem fitting. 

Making social calls was a well-established tradition through the 1800s, and these little cakes would be just one part of the lavish spread that would have been laid out in anticipation for receiving callers. Depending on your social situation, you might receive as many as 100 callers, or perhaps even more, on New Year’s Day. It’s no wonder then, that this recipe is a large one!

Ann Haddad, historian at the Merchant House Museum in New York, wrote a good article a few years ago, about the history of making New Year’s Day calls. It’s a nice read if you’d like to know more about this old custom.

These little cakes are flavored with caraway seed, and since that’s a flavor sadly under-appreciated by most modern American palates, it’s not a bad idea to cut this recipe in half. The last time I made 1800s cookies with caraway seeds, and brought them to my kids’ school, only about one in ten of the children enjoyed them and went back for seconds. I was informed they’d much rather have my sugar cookies or ginger snaps next time, please!

I personally think they’re delicious though, and find that the people who do like them, really like them. If you give them a try, I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!

~ Anna

NEW YEAR’S CAKES
(Very nice.)

1 ¼ lb sugar.
1 lb. butter. 
½ pint cold water. 
2 eggs.
3 ¼ lbs. flour.
1 teaspoonful soda dissolved in hot water.
4 tablespoonfuls caraway seed sprinkled through the flour. 

Rub the butter, or, what is better, chop it up in the flour; dissolve the sugar in the water; mix all well with the beaten eggs, cut in square cakes, or with an oval mould, and bake quickly.

Common Sense in the Household, 1871

One thing I love about my work with 1800s cookbooks is the intertextuality of it all. Plagiarism wasn’t a concern in cook book publishing then, in the same way that it is now, so it’s not uncommon to find recipes that are virtually identical, published in different cook books. I always feel like I’ve scored some kind of prize when I find an example of this, and today’s recipe is a great one. 

When I first decided to make this recipe out of Common Sense In The Household (copyright 1871), I had a feeling I’d seen it before. With a few minutes of searching, I realized that I had. The formatting is a bit different, but if you look in the photo below, you’ll see that the recipes are nearly identical. 

The book on the left is The Gem Cook Book, from 1875. Whether it pulled the recipe from Common Sense In The Household, or (more likely) both volumes drew on an older common source, it’s always fun to find an example like this one. 

Here’s a photo of the recipe as it appears in both cook books:

A FEW COOKING NOTES: 

I’m going to make myself keep today’s notes short, mostly so that I can get this recipe over to you in time to make it, if you’d like. I also have a date with a board game in front of the wood stove that the kids have set up, while I’ve been writing.

What’s up with this mixing order?

If you’ve been following this newsletter for long, you’ve probably heard me go on about how there was a definite order in 1800s cake baking, for which ingredients were to be added in which order. The usual way was to beat the sugar and butter first. Beaten egg yolks were added next, and so on. 

This recipe is quite an exception to that rule, and could possibly be one reason why the directions are unusually detailed. 

Go ahead and follow them just as they’re written, and the recipe turns out perfectly. It will feel like you’re starting off making a pie crust, chopping the butter into the flour like that, and there will come a point where it all seems so dry, it can’t possibly be right. Just keep mixing though, and it will work out to a nice roll-able dough that bakes up beautifully. 

How much water for dissolving the soda?

About one tablespoon was the amount commonly used, when it was specified to dissolve a teaspoon of soda in water. I used one tablespoon, and while this was quite a stiff dough, it turned out well, and I’m not inclined to think more than a tablespoon of water should be used here.

How thick to roll the dough

I went with a slightly generous ¼″ and found that worked well. These little cakes do puff right up nicely as they bake.

What size to cut them

I tried a variety of dimensions, with squares in 1″, 1.5″, and 2″ sizes, and circles that were 2″ in diameter. The 1.5″ squares were my favorites.

Baking these little cakes

To “bake quickly” I found that an oven temperature of 370°F worked well. The 1.5″ square cookies baked beautifully in 9 minutes at that temperature. 1″ squares baked in 8 minutes, while 2″ circles and squares took 10.

Oven temperature and baking time

I submit the following as proof of what a rockstar my mother is. Could I have whipped out this math myself? For sure. Did I want to? Big fat No.

So, how many 1.5″ square cakes does a full batch of this recipe make? She got right back to me with the answer: 

FOURTEEN DOZEN

Yes, that’s a lot of little cakes. 

If you’re entertaining endless callers on New Year’s Day though, you see how they’d get gobbled up quickly, and why a single batch would be such a large one.

Special thanks to my mother for doing math I didn’t want to do!

While I can’t show up in your parlor tomorrow to wish you a very happy New Year, please know that I’m sending you all my best wishes for a wonderful 2026!

Until next time, ~ Anna

📖 Recipe

Some other 1800s cake recipes you might enjoy:

Pin for later: