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Bread Cake
Three cups of dough, very light; three cups of sugar, one cup of butter, three eggs, a nutmeg, raisins, one teaspoonful of pearlash dissolved in a little hot water. Rub the butter and sugar together, add the eggs and spice, and mix all thoroughly with the dough. Beat it well and pour into the pans. It will do to bake immediately, but the cake will be lighter if it stands a short time to rise, before putting it into the oven.
This is a cake built on risen bread dough rather than flour and chemical leavening alone — a common thrift recipe from the days when a batch of bread dough was in the kitchen every few days. The dough does most of the lifting, so its condition matters more than anything else here.
- "Three cups of dough, very light""Three cups of dough, very light" means bread dough that has risen and is puffy, torn into pieces before mixing; the recipe does not say what sort of bread dough. Three cups is roughly a pound and a half, though risen dough is airy and the weight will vary. Dough that has not risen properly will give a dense, bready cake.
- PearlashPotassium carbonate, an early leavening agent refined from wood ashes and largely displaced by saleratus and then baking powder. Food-grade potassium carbonate is still sold for German gingerbread; an equal amount of baking soda is the usual modern stand-in, though it will not taste identical.
- Nutmeg"A nutmeg" means one whole nut, grated — around 2 teaspoons of fresh gratings, which is assertive but correct for this style of cake. Pre-ground nutmeg at that quantity will taste dusty; use about half.
- RaisinsNo quantity is given. One to one and a half cups suits this amount of batter. Toss them in a spoonful of flour before adding so they do not sink to the bottom.
- Mixing methodThis is a creaming method: work the butter and sugar to a paste, beat in the eggs and nutmeg, then cut and squeeze that mixture into the torn dough until no streaks remain. It takes real effort by hand; a stand mixer with the paddle handles it in a few minutes on low.
- Letting it riseFollow the closing advice. Thirty to forty-five minutes in the pans in a warm place, until the batter looks domed and slightly puffed, gives a noticeably lighter crumb — the yeast needs time to recover from the sugar and fat.
- OvenThe original gives no heat. Bake at 350F. Two 9x5-inch loaf pans, greased and lined, take about 45 to 55 minutes; a tube pan will run longer. It is done when a skewer comes out clean and the loaf sounds hollow at the base.
- Yield and keepingTwo loaves, about 16 to 20 slices. Like most heavily sugared bread doughs it improves on the second day and keeps well wrapped for the better part of a week.
Bread cake, sometimes called "dough cake" or "raised cake," belongs to a family of recipes that predates reliable chemical leavening: the cook borrowed a portion of the day's bread dough, enriched it with butter, sugar, eggs and spice, and got a cake without needing to build lightness from scratch. It made sense only in a household that was already baking bread, and it was a way of turning a routine sponge into something festive at little extra cost. The pearlash is the period marker. Potassium carbonate leached from wood ashes was a genuinely American commodity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.