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One Egg Fruit Cake
Two teacups sugar, one egg, one teaspoon mace, piece of butter the size of an egg, stir to a cream; one cup sour milk, one teaspoon soda, three and one-half cups of flour, a little salt, two tablespoons cinnamon, one teaspoon cloves, one cup raisins, one cup currants.
A thrifty spice cake from the era when eggs were counted carefully and sour milk was a resource rather than a mistake. The original gives no pan, temperature or time, so those are the first gaps to fill.
- The teacupTeacup measures were not standardised; they are variously reckoned from a half-cup up to a full cup, with about 3/4 cup a common modern reading. Given that the flour is specified in "cups" and the sugar in "teacups," the writer may have meant something smaller for the sugar; on that reading around 1 1/2 cups total is a sensible amount, and the batter should be thick but droppable.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. This is a lean cake by modern standards, which is why the fruit and the sour milk matter so much to its texture.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally clabbered raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Use buttermilk, or stir a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar into a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. Pasteurised milk left on the counter spoils rather than sours and should not be used.
- Two tablespoons of cinnamonLarge spice quantities are not unusual in books of this kind, but this is a very heavy hand by modern taste, and nineteenth-century ground cinnamon was frequently adulterated. One tablespoon gives a cake that still reads as strongly spiced.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, a small seedless grape, not fresh red or black currants. Both they and the raisins should be tossed with a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- Oven and panThe recipe gives no oven direction, pan or time. As a modern starting point, 350F in a greased and floured loaf pan or an 8-inch square, roughly 45 to 60 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean; a batter this heavy with fruit may need longer.
- Mixing order"Stir to a cream" means beat the sugar, egg and butter together first. Add the soured milk with the soda stirred into it, then the flour, salt and spices, then the fruit last, and get it into the oven promptly once the soda is wet.
- YieldA large cake: more batter than a standard loaf pan will hold, so expect either one very large pan or two smaller ones. It keeps well wrapped for several days.
One-egg cakes were a whole genre in American household books of the later nineteenth century, sitting alongside the eggless and the "poor man's" cakes that appear in the same chapters. Eggs were seasonal and expensive in winter, and a cake that could carry a quantity of dried fruit and a cupboard's worth of spice on the strength of a single egg and a cup of soured milk was a genuine economy. The chemistry is the old one: acid milk plus saleratus or soda for lift, at a time when baking powder was available but by no means universal in home kitchens, and when every household had souring milk to use up.