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Pork Cake
Chop one pound fat pork very fine. Stone and chop one pound raisins. Pour a pint of boiling water over the pork. Use one cupful of molasses, two of sugar, eight of flour, one tablespoonful ground cloves, one of cinnamon, one of saleratus, one egg-the white to be added last.
A fruitcake built on salt pork instead of butter, and one of those recipes that assumes the cook already knows how to bake a loaf. No pan, temperature or time is given, so those are the gaps to fill.
- The porkFat pork here most likely means fat salt pork — the hard white belly or back fat sold for larding and baked beans, rather than fresh pork loin — though the recipe does not specify. Chop it as fine as you can, near a paste; the boiling water softens it so it disperses through the batter and renders during the long bake, doing the work butter would do. If your pork is heavily salted, rinse it before chopping, since the recipe adds no salt of its own to balance it.
- SaleratusSaleratus was an early chemical leavening, potassium bicarbonate at first and later sodium bicarbonate; baking soda is the modern stand-in. A full tablespoon is a large dose by modern standards, but there is a cup of molasses and no other leavening, and the acid in the molasses is what it is there to neutralise. Level the spoon rather than heaping it, and sift it with the flour so it does not streak.
- Stoning raisinsTo stone is to remove seeds. Modern raisins are already seedless, so simply chop a pound of dark raisins, tossing them with a spoonful of the measured flour to keep them from sinking.
- Oven and timeA cake of this density wants a slow to moderate oven, 300–325F, for a long stretch — figure 1 1/2 to 2 hours for large loaves, testing with a skewer at the centre. Higher heat sets the crust before the middle cooks and leaves a raw seam.
- Yield and pansEight cupfuls of flour is an enormous batch by household standards — enough for three 9x5-inch loaves or two loaves plus a small tube cake. Line the pans with parchment; the fruit and molasses catch easily.
- The egg white last"The white to be added last" implies separating the single egg and stirring the white in at the end; the recipe does not say to whip it, and beating it to a foam is optional. With one egg to eight cups of flour it contributes almost nothing structurally, and the batter will look thick and stiff rather than pourable. That is correct.
- KeepingA dense spiced loaf of this sort is generally said to improve after a few days wrapped tightly, and the pork fat should keep it moist. Store it cool and sliced thin.
Pork cake turns up across late nineteenth-century American cookbooks, and it exists for an economic reason: salt pork was, by most accounts, a common cellar staple, while butter was seasonal, expensive and often wanted for the table. Chopped fat pork scalded with boiling water gives a spiced fruitcake its shortening and its keeping quality at once, which is why the recipe is usually loaded with molasses, raisins, cloves and cinnamon hat of the meat. The style belongs to the same rural New England and Midwestern tradition as apple-sauce cake and boiled raisin cake, all of them ways of producing a rich, long-keeping loaf without dairy fat or many eggs.