Sultana Cake
1/3 cup Cottolene. 1 cup sugar. 2 eggs. 1 egg yolk. 1 cup Sultana raisins. 1/2 cup milk. 2¼ cups pastry flour. 4 teaspoons baking powder- 1/4 teaspoon salt. 1/2 teaspoon mace.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene, add sugar gradually, stirring constantly; add well-beaten eggs and yolk. Mix and sift flour (except one tablespoon), baking powder and salt and mace; add to first mixture alternately with milk. Dredge raisins with tablespoon flour, add to mixture and beat thoroughly. Turn mixture into a well-greased, brick-shaped bread pan and bake forty minutes in a moderate oven. Frost if desired.
Fifth Sunday
A plain butter-style loaf cake from a cookbook written to sell shortening. The only real obstacles are the branded fat and the leavening, both of which need adjusting.
- CottoleneA branded shortening of cottonseed oil stiffened with beef suet, sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company and long gone from shelves. Use the same volume of vegetable shortening, or 1/3 cup softened unsalted butter for better flavor, though butter will brown the crust faster.
- Sultana raisinsGolden raisins, seedless and paler than the muscat raisins then sold with seeds still in. Any golden raisin works; plumping them briefly in hot water and drying them well keeps them from stealing moisture from the crumb.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F (175C). Forty minutes suits a loaf of this size, but start testing at 35 minutes with a skewer in the center.
- Brick-shaped bread panA rectangular loaf pan; a modern 9 by 5 inch pan is the nearest equivalent, though period bread pans were often smaller. The recipe calls for it well greased; lining the base with parchment also helps with release.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to 2 1/4 cups flour is heavy by modern standards. Period powders varied in strength and lost potency in the tin; 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons of current double-acting powder should give ample lift, and may avoid the aftertaste and coarse crumb that excess powder can produce.
- Pastry flourLower in protein than all-purpose. To approximate it, measure 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour and replace about 2 tablespoons of it with cornstarch; the fuller 2-tablespoons-per-cup swap yields something closer to cake flour.
- Dredging the raisinsThe reserved tablespoon of flour coats the fruit so it is less likely to sink. Toss the raisins in it just before adding them, and stop mixing once the batter is even, despite the direction to "beat thoroughly."
- YieldOne loaf, roughly ten to twelve slices. Wrapped, it should keep three or four days.
52 Sunday Dinners was compiled by Elizabeth O. Hiller and published in 1913 by the N. K. Fairbank Company, makers of Cottolene — which is why a cottonseed-oil shortening turns up in the first line of a cake recipe rather than butter or lard. Corporate cookbooks of this kind were widely distributed in America before the First World War, and they promoted an industrial fat in recipes that had often used dairy or lard. The cake itself is older than the book: sultana cake, named for the pale seedless grape traditionally traced to Ottoman Turkey and exported dried through Smyrna, was a standby of English and American tea tables, a lighter cousin of the heavy fruitcake, spiced here with mace rather than the fuller mix of cinnamon, clove and nutmeg. Its heading as a Fifth Sunday dessert reflects the book's logic of assigning a full menu to every Sunday of the year.