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White Fruit Cake
Follow the directions and proportions given for White Cake, adding to the dry ingredients three-fourths cupful of chopped raisins, currants and citron, with a little candied orange peel and candied pineapple. Put together with orange frosting.
A variation recipe that assumes you have the book's White Cake in front of you, so most of the work is in reconstructing what that base was: a butter-or-shortening cake leavened with baking powder and whitened by using egg whites only. The points below cover what the shorthand leaves out.
- The base cakeA period white cake of this type runs roughly 1/2 cup shortening, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour, 3 teaspoons baking powder, 1 cup milk and the whites of 4 to 6 eggs, beaten stiff and folded in last. Use the book's own White Cake if you have the full text; the proportions above are the standard of the era, not a transcription.
- Snowdrift is the pointSnowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening (hydrogenated in its later form), and if this page comes from the Snowdrift booklet the base cake would have been made with it — though this recipe itself names no fat. Any modern vegetable shortening substitutes cup for cup. Butter works but tints the crumb, and the intent of a white fruit cake is pallor.
- Dredge the fruitToss the chopped raisins, currants, citron, orange peel and pineapple in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in. Undredged candied fruit sinks to the bottom of a soft batter and welds itself to the pan.
- Three-fourths cupful totalThree-fourths cupful covers the raisins, currants and citron together, not each kind; the orange peel and pineapple are a small extra on top of that. This is a light fruit cake, closer to a layer cake with fruit in it than to a Christmas cake, so resist the urge to double it or the batter will not hold.
- CitronCandied citron is the thick rind of the citron, a citrus fruit — though in America a citron melon was often candied and sold under the same name. It is sold in tubs at holiday season and increasingly hard to find. Candied lemon peel is the nearest stand-in; it is sharper and softer, so chop it fine.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature, deferring to the White Cake directions; a modern equivalent is 350F. Two 9-inch layers take 25 to 30 minutes; a single loaf runs 45 to 55. The cake is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back — colour is an unreliable guide here, since you are trying to keep it pale.
- Orange frostingPeriod orange frostings were made either boiled or uncooked, built on orange juice and grated rind rather than milk: confectioners' sugar beaten with a little softened shortening or butter, orange juice to consistency, and the zest for aroma. Zest carries the flavour; juice alone tastes mostly of sugar.
- Yield and keepingTwo layers serve 10 to 12. Fruited white cake keeps better than plain, three or four days covered at room temperature, and the candied fruit continues to soften the crumb as it sits.
White cake — meaning a cake whitened by using only the egg whites — became possible on a domestic scale once chemical baking powder and cheap refined sugar arrived in the second half of the nineteenth century, and it stayed fashionable into the 1920s as a bride's cake and a special-occasion layer cake. Its fruited version is often described as a deliberate counterpart to dark fruit cake: no molasses, no browning, just candied peel and pale dried fruit suspended in a light crumb — though spiced and spirit-soaked white fruit cakes existed too. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of manufacturer cookbooks like this one, published to promote Snowdrift, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening marketed by the Southern Cotton Oil Company. Such books were organised as families of variations on a handful of master recipes, which kept the page count down and, not incidentally, kept the reader turning back to the pages where the brand name appeared.