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Composition Cake
One and one-half pounds brown sugar, one and three-fourth pounds flour, fourteen ounces butter, four eggs, two thirds pint water, one teaspoon soda, one and one-fourth pounds chopped raisins, one tablespoon mace, one tablespoon cinnamon, one-half gill of wine, one nutmeg; the above recipe makes two loaves in two quart pans.
A big, plainly written pound-cake-by-weight from the era when bakers worked from a scale rather than cups. The original gives no oven temperature, no baking time and no mixing method, so those are the gaps to fill.
- Weights into cups1 3/4 lb flour is roughly 6 to 6 1/2 cups; 1 1/2 lb brown sugar about 3 1/3 cups packed; 14 oz butter is 3 1/2 sticks. Weigh if you can — the recipe was written for scales and the flour figure is where cup measures drift most.
- The liquid measuresTwo-thirds of a pint is about 1 1/3 cups water. A gill is half a cup, so half a gill of wine is 1/4 cup — sherry, madeira or any sweet fortified wine suits the spicing.
- Oven and timeNeither is given. A cake of this density in a 2-quart pan wants a moderate oven, 325-350F, for something like 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours; test with a skewer at the centre rather than by the clock.
- Pan sizeA two-quart pan is close to a standard 9x5-inch loaf tin. Grease and line, and expect the batter to fill each tin about two-thirds full.
- The sodaOne teaspoon of soda with no cream of tartar or sour milk relies on the acidity of the brown sugar and the wine. The lift will be modest; this is meant to be a close, heavy cake, not a light one.
- Spice quantitiesA tablespoon each of mace and cinnamon plus a whole grated nutmeg (about 2 to 3 teaspoons) is assertive by current taste, though not out of line for the period. Halving the mace and cinnamon will suit some modern palates better.
- Method, which the original omitsCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the flour and water alternately with the soda sifted into the flour. Toss the chopped raisins in a little of the measured flour before folding them in so they do not sink.
- YieldTwo loaves, each cutting into 10-12 slices. Like most fruited cakes of this weight it improves after a day wrapped, and keeps well for a week.
"Composition cake" is a name that turns up repeatedly in nineteenth-century American household books, usually alongside its close relatives election cake and cup cake. The name is generally taken to mean a cake "composed" of a fixed proportion of standard household stores — sugar, flour, butter, eggs, spice and raisins — set down as a formula a cook could keep in her head and scale up or down. A solid, keepable spiced loaf like this was the sort of thing sliced with tea or cold meat at the end of the day, not served as a course of its own. The heavy hand with mace, cinnamon and nutmeg, and the splash of wine, mark it as a descendant of the older English rich fruit cakes, simplified for a kitchen with a wood stove and no reliable thermometer.