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Excellent Fruit Cake
One and a half pounds raisins, one and a fourth pounds currants, three-fourths pound citron, pound butter, pound sugar, one and a fourth pounds flour, ten eggs, two table-spoons lemon, two tea-spoons yeast powder; mix a fourth pound of the flour in the fruit. -Mrs.. J. W. Grubbs, Richmond, Ind..
A weight-based formula in the older style: the ingredient list is the recipe, and the method is assumed. This is a pound-cake batter carrying nearly four pounds of fruit, so almost everything that can go wrong is a matter of oven heat and pan preparation.
- Yeast powder is baking powderNineteenth-century American books use "yeast powder" for commercial baking powder. Two teaspoons is modest for a pound and a quarter of flour; most of the lift comes from the ten eggs. There is no yeast and no rising time.
- Total weight and yieldThe batter comes to roughly eight pounds. Expect two 9x5-inch loaves plus a small one, or one 10-inch tube cake and a loaf. Baked as a single mass in a deep pan it will need a very long, slow bake.
- Oven heatFruit cake of this density wants a slow oven, 275-300F, for three to four hours in loaves. High heat sets and browns the crust long before the middle cooks, and the sugar in the fruit scorches. A skewer to the centre should come out clean and the cake should have stopped smelling of raw egg.
- The flour in the fruitThe final clause is the one instruction the recipe bothers to give, and it matters. Tossing a quarter pound of the flour with the raisins, currants and citron keeps the fruit suspended rather than sinking into a solid layer at the base. Use the remaining pound in the batter.
- Assumed methodCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs a few at a time (ten eggs is about 500g shelled, and they will curdle the butter if added in a rush), fold in the flour, then the floured fruit and the lemon.
- Currants and citronCurrants here are dried Zante grapes, not fresh blackcurrants and not the redcurrant of jelly. Citron is candied citron peel, sold in blocks; chop it small. If you cannot find it, candied orange and lemon peel is the usual substitute.
- "Two table-spoons lemon"Genuinely ambiguous. It most likely means lemon juice or lemon extract; some contemporaneous recipes mean grated rind. Two tablespoons of extract would be overwhelming, so juice plus the zest of a lemon is the safer reading.
- Pan preparation and keepingLine the tins with buttered paper; at this baking time bare greased metal will set a hard crust. The cake keeps for weeks wrapped closely, and improves for the first ten days or so.
Buckeye Cookery (the 1877 Minneapolis edition was titled Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping; it grew out of the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, Marysville, Ohio, 1876) was assembled from contributions by named women across the Midwest, which is why this page carries Mrs. J. W. Grubbs of Richmond, Indiana, rather than an editor's byline. The form of the recipe is as telling as its contents: a bare list of weights, no method, no oven instruction, because a reader consulting it was assumed to know how to cream butter and manage a wood range by feel. Cakes like this were the expensive end of home baking. Raisins, currants and candied citron were imported, sugar and butter were bought by the pound, and ten eggs was a serious outlay outside the spring flush, so a fruit cake of this size was made for a wedding, Christmas, or a funeral rather than for Tuesday.