Home › Cake-Making › Old-Fashioned Loaf Cake
Old-Fashioned Loaf Cake
Three pounds (three quarts sifted and well heaped) flour, one and a fourth pounds (a rounded pint of soft) butter, one and threefourths pounds (one quart) sugar, five gills new milk, half pint yeast, three eggs, two pounds raisins, tea-spoon soda, gill of brandy or wine, or a fourth pint of molasses, two tea-spoons cinnamon and two of nutmeg. Scald the milk, cool to blood warm, add the yeast, then the flour, to which all the butter and half the sugar have been added; then mix together, and let rise until light. It is better to set this sponge over night, and in the morning add the other ingredients (flouring raisins), and let rise again. When light, fill bakingpans and let rise again. Bake in a moderate oven. This recipe makes three large loaves, and is a standard, economical loaf-cake.- Mrs. Ex-Gov. John J. Bagley, Mich.
This is a yeast-raised cake in the older sense — closer to a rich sweet bread than to a modern butter cake — and the schedule, not the ingredients, is what makes it work. Plan on an overnight sponge and three separate rises.
- The gill and the pintA gill is half a cup, so five gills of milk is 2½ cups and a gill of brandy is ½ cup. The book's own weights are the reliable guide: 3 lb flour, 1¼ lb butter, 1¾ lb sugar, 2 lb raisins.
- "Half pint yeast"This means a cup of liquid yeast — homemade barm or a bought brewer's yeast slurry — not modern dry yeast, and no honest conversion exists because the strength of the original is unknown. Any substitution is a judgment call; expect a slower, longer rise than a bread recipe.
- Blood warmAbout 98F. The milk is scalded and then cooled to blood heat before the yeast goes in; heat well short of boiling will damage or kill the yeast, so milk added too hot will keep the sponge from rising.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 350F, though the book gives no temperatures at all. These are large, dense, sugar-and-butter-heavy loaves, so 325F is safer for even baking, and they will want an hour or more — test with a skewer rather than by clock.
- The sodaA teaspoon of soda is here to neutralize the acidity of the overnight sponge (and of the molasses, if that is the version chosen), rather than as the main leavening. The recipe adds it in the morning with the other ingredients.
- Flouring the raisinsTossing 2 lb of raisins in flour before they go in keeps them suspended rather than sinking through a slack, wet dough. Note that all the flour goes into the sponge the night before, so the dusting flour is additional.
- Don't overproof the pansThe third rise in the tins is the one people ruin. Take the loaves to roughly doubled and get them into the oven; a rich yeasted batter this heavy will collapse if left to its limit.
- YieldThree large loaves, as stated — the ingredients come to something over ten pounds. Halving it is reasonable for a modern household, and the loaves keep and slice better after a day.
Loaf cake of this kind belongs to the family of enriched festival breads: before chemical leavening was cheap and dependable, a cake sweet and heavy with butter, sugar and dried fruit was raised with the same barm used for bread, which is why the method reads like a sponge-and-dough bread recipe with spices and raisins folded in. By 1877, when this collection appeared, saleratus and baking powder were widely available, and the single teaspoon of soda here sits alongside the older technique rather than replacing it. The attribution is typical of the book, which gathered contributions from prominent Midwestern households: Mrs. Bagley was the wife of John J. Bagley, governor of Michigan from 1873 to 1877.