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Old Hartford Election Cake
Five pounds sifted flour, two of butter, two of sugar, thre gills distillery yeast or twice the quantity of home brewed, four eggs, gill of wine, gill of brandy, one quart sweet milk, half an ounce of nutmeg, two pounds raisins, one of citron; rub the butter and flour together very fine, add half the sugar, then the yeast and half the milk (hot in winter, blood-warm in summer), then add the eggs,, then remainder of the milk, and the wine; beat well and let rise in a warm place all night; in the morning beat a long time, adding brandy, sugar, spice, and fruit well floured, and allow to rise again very light, after which put in cake pans and let rise ten or fifteen minutes; have the oven about as hot as for bread. This eake will keep any length of time. For raised cakes use potato yeast if fresh made; it is always a perfect success. This recipe is over one hundred years old.-Mrs. Eliza Burnham, Milford Center.
A yeast-raised fruit cake built on bread-dough logic rather than chemical leavening, and scaled for a household that baked in quantity. Nearly everything here works as written once the volumes and the yeast are translated.
- Scale firstFive pounds of flour is roughly 18 to 20 cups, and with the butter, sugar, milk, eggs and fruit added the finished batch runs to fifteen pounds or more. Quartering the recipe is the sensible starting point.
- A gillHalf a cup. So a gill each of wine and brandy, and three gills (1 1/2 cups) of yeast.
- Distillery yeastLiquid barm skimmed from a brewery or distillery ferment, sold or begged by the pint. Nothing sold today matches it directly; 1 1/2 cups of barm carried a modest amount of live yeast in a great deal of liquid, so if you substitute dry yeast you must also account for the missing liquid. Treat the conversion as approximate rather than exact.
- Potato yeastThe note at the end refers to a home ferment of mashed potato, sugar and flour kept going in the pantry, usually carried forward from an earlier batch or begun with a little hop or brewer's yeast rather than caught wild. A mature sourdough or poolish is the nearest modern stand-in here.
- Milk temperature"Hot in winter, blood-warm in summer" means the milk is adjusted to offset the kitchen, so the dough ends up at the same moderate warmth either way. Aim for a dough that feels barely warm to the hand; scalding milk will kill the yeast outright.
- NutmegHalf an ounce is around two tablespoons of freshly grated nutmeg across the full five-pound batch. It is assertive but not absurd at that scale; grate it fresh, since pre-ground nutmeg at that quantity turns dusty.
- CitronCandied citron peel, still sold at holiday baking counters. Candied orange or lemon peel substitutes without complaint. Flouring the fruit, as directed, keeps it from sinking through a slack dough.
- Oven heat"About as hot as for bread" in a wood oven puts you somewhere in the region of 375 to 425F; the recipe itself gives no number. A cake this rich and this large wants the lower end; count on 60 to 90 minutes for a full loaf pan and check for an internal temperature of 190 to 200F.
- The three risesOvernight, then again after the fruit and brandy go in, then a short ten to fifteen minutes in the pan. Do not shorten the second rise: the sugar, butter and alcohol all slow the yeast, and an underproofed election cake bakes dense and damp.
History: Election cake is associated with Connecticut, and particularly with Hartford, where election-time and militia gatherings brought crowds into town and households baked large keeping cakes. A recipe titled "Election Cake" appears in Amelia Simmons's American Cookery in 1796, generally described as the first cookbook by an American author; that is some eighty years before this collection, so it shows the form was well established, though it does not confirm the full hundred years Mrs. Burnham claims. What distinguishes it from later fruitcakes is the leavening: it is raised with brewer's barm or a potato ferment and proofed like bread dough, at a time when chemical leaveners were not yet a kitchen staple. Its appearance in an Ohio community collection, contributed from Milford Center with a note on its age, shows how New England recipes traveled west with the families who carried them.