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French Loaf Cake
Five cups sugar, three of butter, two of milk, ten of flour, six eggs, three nutmegs, pound seeded raisins, a grated lemon, small tea-spoon soda, wine-glass wine, one of brandy, or, two-thirds of a cup of Orleans molasses. - Mrs. A. S. Chapman.
A list of proportions rather than a method, in the style of the period: the cook was expected to know that you cream butter and sugar, add eggs, then alternate dry and wet. What follows fills in what the page leaves out.
- It is enormousTen cups of flour with three cups of butter and six eggs makes something on the order of eight to ten pounds of batter. Halving or quartering the whole list is reasonable; the proportions hold at any scale.
- Cups in this bookThe nineteenth-century American cup is close to the modern 8 fl oz measure. Ten cups of flour works out to somewhere between 2 1/2 and 3 lb depending on how it is measured; period tables often reckon four cups to the pound, while a modern scooped cup runs heavier. Butter at three cups is 1 1/2 lb, or six sticks.
- Wine-glassA wine-glass in nineteenth-century American receipts is about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup. "One of brandy" means one wine-glass of brandy, not one cup.
- The molasses alternativeThe final clause is ambiguous as written. Read in context it substitutes for the wine and brandy, giving a darker, plainer cake; adding it on top of the spirits will make the batter too wet for the stated flour.
- Three nutmegsThree whole grated nutmegs is roughly two to three tablespoons of ground, which will taste medicinal to a modern palate. One nutmeg, or a tablespoon of freshly grated, sits closer to what most people now expect. Nutmeg was used generously in cakes of this period, and large loaf cakes calling for two or three whole nutmegs turn up often enough that the quantity need not be a misprint.
- Soda without much acidA small teaspoon of soda has little to work against unless you use the molasses version; the wine and the lemon supply only a little acid, and there is no baking powder here. The lift comes mainly from creaming the butter and sugar thoroughly and beating the eggs well. If you go the wine-and-brandy route, expect a dense, close-grained fruit-cake crumb.
- Raisins"Pound seeded raisins" means a pound of raisins that have had their seeds removed, not raisins sown in soil. Modern seedless raisins do the job directly. Toss them in a little of the measured flour before folding in so they do not sink.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given because the book assumes a wood range. Bake at 325F in deep, lined loaf pans; a full-size loaf of this batter takes 1 1/2 to 2 hours, and it should be tented with foil once the top colours.
- YieldThe full quantity fills three to four 9-inch loaf pans. It keeps for weeks wrapped, and improves after a few days.
"Loaf cake" in American cookbooks of the 1870s and 80s meant a rich, yeast- or soda-raised cake baked in a bread pan rather than a tin ring, and the qualifier "French" seems to have been applied loosely to any version enriched with spirits, spice and fruit han than than a claim of French origin — plausibly a signal of luxury. Buckeye Cookery, first published at Marysville, Ohio in 1877 and assembled from contributions by named housewives, is full of such attributions: Mrs. A. S. Chapman's name on the recipe may well have served as a kind of guarantee, though the book's own preface claims its receipts were tested. The bare list of quantities with no method is characteristic of the whole genre; these were aides-memoires for cooks who already knew how a cake was put together, and the compilers spent their explanatory pages on oven management and the state of the butter instead. The Orleans molasses alternative is a practical touch — New Orleans molasses was widely used as a sweetener in the Midwest, and offering it in place of wine and brandy would have let the same recipe serve households that kept no spirits.