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Fruit Cake (Twelve eggs one and a half)
Twelve eggs, one and a half pounds each of butter, sugar and flour, two pounds each of raisins and currants, one pound citron, one half-pint molasses, one ounce each of nutmeg, mace and cloves, one and a half glasses of jelly (grape is best), one-fourth pint each of wine and brandy, more flour if needed. Put dough in pans, set in steamer, taking care that the cover is made to fit very tight; if necessary put cloth under the lid and shut it down on it, taking care that it does not touch the cake, or lay several thicknesses of cloth over the lid. Steam two hours and bake one hour. - Chas. Cyphers, Minneapolis, Minn.
A steamed-then-baked fruit cake on a nineteenth-century scale: the batter runs to something over twelve pounds. Read the quantities before you commit, and treat the steaming stage as the point of the whole method.
- Scale and yieldFour and a half pounds of butter, sugar and flour together, plus five pounds of fruit, and with the eggs, molasses, jelly and spirits it comes to roughly 12-13 lb of finished cake. That is several large tube pans, or five to six 9x5-inch loaves. Halving or quartering the recipe works cleanly.
- The steaming is the hingeTwo hours of steam sets the batter gently and keeps a very dense, sugar-heavy cake from drying or scorching before the centre cooks. The tight lid and the cloth are there to stop condensation dripping onto the surface; a sheet of foil crimped over each pan, then the steamer lid, does the same job. Keep the water at a steady simmer and top it up with boiling water.
- Oven for the final hourThe book does not name a heat. A moderate oven, around 325F, is a reasonable modern choice for the finishing hour; the recipe itself gives no guidance. It is there to firm and colour the crust, not to cook the cake through.
- "A glass" of jellyThe recipe does not define the measure. If a jelly glass or tumbler of about half a pint is meant, one and a half glasses is roughly a cup and a half of grape jelly; some period recipes use a much smaller wine glass, so this is an interpretation rather than a fixed quantity. It goes in for moisture, acidity and colour.
- Gills of wine and brandyOne-fourth pint is a gill, half a cup. So half a cup each of wine and brandy.
- An ounce each of spiceThree ounces of ground spice in all, which is roughly a quarter to a third of a cup of each, depending on the spice. This is authentically heavy handed; if you scale down, scale the spice down with everything else.
- No chemical leaveningThere is no soda or baking powder here. Lift comes entirely from twelve eggs beaten well and from creaming the butter and sugar thoroughly, so do not shortcut either step.
- Fruit and flourCurrants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh berries. Toss the raisins, currants and diced citron in a little of the measured flour before folding them in. The recipe's "more flour if needed" refers to bringing the batter to the right stiffness.
- KeepingA cake this rich, with wine and brandy in it, keeps for months wrapped in cloth and paper in a cool place. It is better after two or three weeks than on the day it is made.
Buckeye Cookery, first published in Marysville, Ohio, in 1877 and reissued repeatedly through the 1880s under a Minneapolis imprint, was assembled from contributions sent in by named householders, which is why this cake carries Chas. Cyphers's name and address at the end. The book prints several fruit cakes side by side, from cheap ones with a little fruit and soda to this sort, which is essentially a wedding or Christmas cake: pound-cake proportions of butter, sugar, flour and egg, weighted with more fruit than batter and preserved by sugar and spirits. Steaming the cake before baking made sense in the era of wood- and coal-fired ranges, where oven heat was uneven and hard to hold low for three hours; the steamer gave a reliably gentle, moist heat and the oven was used only at the end for the crust. Citron, the candied peel of a thick-rinded citrus, and imported currants and mace mark this as a special-occasion cake in a Midwestern kitchen.