Pork Cake
Thirteen ounces of fat salt pork chopped very fine; pour on one pint boiling water; when cool add one teacupful molasses, three teacups sugar, one tabelspconful cloves (scant,) one heaping tablespoonful of cinnamon, one tablespoonful soda, nine cups flour, one pound of raisins.
A keeping cake in the old farmhouse style: the salt pork supplies all the fat, the boiling water renders it, and there are no eggs and no butter anywhere in it. It is a large batch and it wants a slow, patient bake.
- The hinge: chop and scald the pork properlyThe fat must be minced to something close to a paste before the boiling water goes on, or you will find chewy white flecks through the finished crumb. The pint of boiling water half-melts the fat and leaves it suspended; let it cool to lukewarm before the soda and flour go in, or the leavening will spend itself early.
- What "fat salt pork" meansDry-salt-cured fatback or streaky salt pork, not bacon (which is smoked and cured differently) and not fresh pork belly. Thirteen ounces is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups minced. Rinse it well and taste a scrap; if it is aggressively salty, soak it in cold water for an hour and pat dry, since the recipe adds no other salt and no way to correct it later.
- Teacups and tablespoonsA nineteenth-century teacup is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, so three teacups of sugar is roughly 2 1/4 cups and the molasses about 3/4 cup. The "nine cups flour" is a full-size cup measure and weighs about 2 1/2 lb on its own; with the water, sugar, molasses, pork and raisins this is a several-pound batch — a two- or three-loaf recipe, not one.
- Soda, not baking powderOne tablespoon of soda is a great deal by modern standards; it is there to react with the molasses, which in the period was generally more acidic than today's mild table molasses. Two teaspoons is closer to right with a modern bottle, and using dark or blackstrap molasses helps. Excess soda tastes soapy and darkens the crumb.
- Oven and timingThe original gives none. Bake at 325F, which suits a dense fruit batter: about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours for 9x5 loaves, tested with a skewer to the centre. Tent with foil once the top has coloured, as the molasses and sugar brown well before the middle is set.
- Raisins and flourA pound of raisins is about 3 cups. Toss them with a few spoonfuls of the measured flour before folding in so they stay distributed. The dough is stiff and heavy; it will not pour.
- SpicesA scant tablespoon of cloves is powerful even in a batch this size — measure it scant as written, or pull back to two teaspoons and let the heaping tablespoon of cinnamon lead.
- KeepingThis is the point of the cake. Wrapped well, it holds for weeks and improves for the first several days as the spice settles and the fat carries the flavour. Serve in thin slices.
Pork cake, sometimes advertised as "pork fruit cake" or "poor man's fruit cake," belongs to the era when butter was seasonal and eggs were worth money at market but a barrel of salt pork sat in every cellar the year round. Rendering the cured fat with boiling water gave a rich, long-keeping crumb without either. Versions of it are common in American community and church cookbooks from roughly the 1870s onward, often credited to a named contributor and often boasting of how long the cake will keep.