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White Fruit Cake
Two cups white sugar, three cups flour, one-half cup butter, three-fourths cup sweet milk, four cups of currants, one cup of raisins, one-half cup citron, whites of six eggs, one teaspoon cream tartar, one-half teaspoon soda, one nutmeg. This makes two loaves.
A typical late-Victorian "white" cake: no yolks, no molasses, no dark spice, so the crumb stays pale under a heavy load of fruit. The recipe assumes you know the creaming method and the state of your own oven, so both need filling in.
- The hinge: fruit-to-batter ratioFour cups of currants plus a cup of raisins and half a cup of citron is nearly as much fruit by volume as batter. Toss the fruit with two or three tablespoons of the measured flour before folding it in, or it will sink into a solid layer at the bottom of each loaf.
- Method the recipe omitsCream the butter and sugar, add the milk alternately with the flour sifted with the cream of tartar and soda, fold in the stiffly beaten whites last, then the floured fruit. Stirring the whites in roughly costs you the lift the recipe depends on.
- Cream of tartar and sodaOne teaspoon cream of tartar with half a teaspoon soda is a homemade single-acting baking powder, roughly equal to two teaspoons of modern baking powder. If you substitute, drop both original leaveners rather than adding powder on top of them.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as against the buttermilk or sour milk called for in soda-only recipes. Whole milk is the closest match.
- Currants and citron"Currants" here are dried Zante currants, the small black raisins, not fresh redcurrants. Citron is candied citron peel, still sold in blocks around the winter holidays; candied lemon peel is the usual stand-in.
- One nutmegA whole nutmeg grated yields about two to three teaspoons, which is assertive by current standards. Half that amount, freshly grated, suits most modern palates.
- Oven and timeFruit this dense wants a slow oven, 300-325F, for about an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half in two greased and paper-lined 8x4-inch loaf pans. Test with a skewer in the centre; tent the tops with foil if they colour before the middle sets.
- Yield and keepingTwo loaves, each cutting into ten or twelve slices. Wrapped well, they improve over two or three days as the fruit moisture spreads through the crumb.
White fruit cake was the lighter, more genteel cousin of the black fruit cake, and its distinguishing feature is subtraction: no egg yolks, no brown sugar, no molasses, no dark rum, no cloves or allspice. Pale cakes are often said to have carried a certain prestige in nineteenth-century American baking, since white flour, white sugar and a plentiful supply of eggs to use for their whites alone all suggested a well-stocked household; nutmeg was among the few spices used. If it is indeed placed under "Supper," that would reflect how such books organised the day rather than any oddity of the cake itself. The evening meal in a great many American homes of the period was a light spread of cold dishes, bread, preserves and cake, and a keeping cake of this kind suited that purpose, as well as callers and, in its iced form, weddings.