Simnel Cake
3/4 cupful sugar 3/4 cupful Crisco 4 eggs 2 cupfuls sultana raisins 1/4 cupful seeded raisins 1/2 cupful chopped candied citron peel 2 cupfuls flour 1 teaspoonful baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful almond extract 3/4 teaspoonful salt
For Filling and Icing
1/4 lb. ground almonds 2 cupfuls powdered sugar 2 eggs 1 teaspoonful almond extract For cake. Cream Crisco and sugar together, add eggs well beaten, flour, baking powder, salt, almond extract, raisins, and peel. Make filling by mixing almonds with powdered sugar, eggs well beaten and almond extract. Line Criscoed cake tin with paper and place in half of cake mixture, then put in layer of filling, then remaining half of cake mixture. Bake in moderate oven. When cake is nearly baked, place remaining almond paste on top and finish baking. Cake takes from one hour to one and a quarter hours. Sufficient for medium-sized cake.
This is a formula rather than a set of directions — the book gives quantities and assumes the cook knows what to do with them. It is a plain creamed pound-cake batter carrying a heavy load of fruit, and the ratios tell you almost everything you need.
- No method is givenCream the fat and sugar, beat in the eggs one at a time, fold in the flour sifted with baking powder and salt, then the fruit and extract. There is no added liquid: four eggs are the only moisture, so the batter should be stiff enough to hold a spoon upright.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote Crisco, then a new all-vegetable shortening. Any modern solid shortening works as written; butter gives better flavour and browns more, though its water content means it is not quite an exact equivalent.
- Sultana raisinsSultanas are golden raisins. Two cupfuls plus the seeded raisins and citron is a lot of fruit for two cupfuls of flour, so toss the fruit in a spoonful of the measured flour to keep it from sinking.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" meant large muscatel-type raisins with the pips removed by hand — not "seedless," which was a different trade term at the time. Ordinary dark raisins are the modern equivalent.
- Candied citron peelCitron is the thick-rinded fruit sold candied in half-inch chunks; supermarket mixed peel is mostly orange and lemon and is sweeter and softer. The recipe asks only that it be chopped; chop it small, or it forms wet pockets.
- Oven and tinThe page gives no oven direction at all. For a fruited cake this dense a slow oven, somewhere around 300-325F, in an 8-inch round tin lined with a double thickness of paper, would suit. Reckon on 1 1/2 to 2 hours, testing with a skewer; cover the top with paper if it colours early.
- Almond extractHalf a teaspoonful is standing in for the almond paste that normally defines a simnel. If you want the traditional cake, a layer of marzipan baked through the middle and a second layer grilled on top after cooling is the usual treatment.
- YieldSomething over 2 lb of cake, twelve to sixteen slices. It keeps well wrapped for a week or more and improves after a day or two.
Simnel is an old English word for a fine-flour cake, generally traced to Latin simila, the whitest grade of wheat flour, and the name attached to several distinct regional cakes — Shrewsbury, Bury and Devizes each had their own. It was a Mothering Sunday cake before it became an Easter one: servants and apprentices given leave mid-Lent to visit their mothers carried a rich cake with them, and the eleven marzipan balls now set around the top, said to stand for the apostles less Judas, are generally reckoned a late addition rather than an ancient custom. This version comes from A Calendar of Dinners, one of the recipe booklets Procter & Gamble issued after 1911 to teach American cooks what to do with Crisco, which explains both the shortening and the stripped-down, almost bare presentation: the point of the page was the fat, not the feast day.