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Cincinnati Cake
Pour over one pound fat salt pork, chopped fine and free from lean and rind, one pint boiling water, let stand until nearly cold; add two cups brown sugar, one of molasses, one table-spoon each of cloves and nutmeg, and two of cinnamon, two pounds raisins, fourth pound citron, half glass brandy, three tea-spoons of baking powder, and seven cups of sifted flour. Bake slowly two and a half hours. This is excellent, and requires neither butter or eggs. -Mrs. G. E. Kinney.
A salt pork fruit cake: the finely chopped fat pork replaces both butter and eggs, and the boiling water partly melts it into a shortening. A few things need translating before you start.
- Bake slowly means 300FBake slowly -- the book gives no temperatures; "slow" is conventionally read today as somewhere around 300-325F, and two and a half hours suits a cake this dense.
- The porkUse plain cured salt pork or fatback, not smoked bacon, and cut away every scrap of lean and rind as directed. Chop it to something near a mince, or grind it briefly, so no piece survives baking as a recognizable lump of fat.
- Salt is the variableModern salt pork varies a good deal in saltiness and the recipe adds no salt of its own. If yours is heavily cured, rinse it before chopping.
- Half glass brandyGenuinely ambiguous. A period wineglass ran about 2 fl oz and a tumbler considerably more, so "half a glass" could mean anything from roughly 1 to 4 fluid ounces.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold near the glace fruit at holidays. Chop it small. Mixed candied peel is the usual substitute if citron is unavailable.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons for seven cups of flour is well under the modern proportion of about a teaspoon per cup; expect a dense, close crumb.
- Pan and yieldThis is a very big cake; the ingredients come to something on the order of eight pounds of batter, so it needs several loaf pans or a large tube pan. It serves twenty or more in thin slices.
- Judging donenessA skewer will come out sticky from the raisins, so go by internal temperature: 205-210F at the center. Tent the top with foil if it colors before the middle sets.
- KeepingLike other heavily spiced, heavily fruited cakes, it improves after a few days wrapped tightly. The pork fat keeps it moist far longer than a butter cake.
Pork cake belongs to a family of nineteenth-century American cakes built to be made without butter or eggs, both of which were seasonal, perishable and often scarce in a farm household in late winter. Salt pork, by contrast, was in the barrel year round, and its fat behaves much like lard once boiling water and a long slow bake have rendered it. Recipes of this type appear under a variety of local names, and their appearance in Buckeye Cookery (1877), a book compiled from Ohio housekeepers' contributions, is typical: the credit to Mrs. G. E. Kinney marks it as a household formula passed along rather than a professional confection. The heavy hand with cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg, the raisins and citron, and the splash of brandy all point to its role as a keeping cake for holidays, and the contributor's note that it "requires neither butter or eggs" is offered as the recipe's chief selling point.