Home › Cake-Making › Spice Cake
Spice Cake
Three pounds seedless raisins, one and a half pounds citron, one pound butter, two and a half coffee-cups sugar, two of sweet milk, four of flour, six eggs, two large tea-spoons baking-powder, three tea-spoons cinnamon, two of mace. - Mrs. Gov. Potts, Montana.
This is a list of ingredients with no method, no pan and no oven note, which is normal for Buckeye Cookery — the book assumed you had made a fruited cake before. What follows fills in what a modern cook needs to read between the lines.
- It is a fruitcake, whatever the title saysFour and a half pounds of fruit against four cups of flour puts this well past any cake you would recognise as a spice cake. The batter's job is to bind the raisins and citron, not to rise around them.
- The coffee-cupA coffee-cup is conventionally taken as the larger of the two cup measures, usually read as about 8 fl oz, against a tea-cup of about 6 fl oz; the recipe itself does not define them. So roughly 2½ cups sugar, 2 cups milk, 4 cups flour. The proportions are forgiving here, but if you want a batter that holds the fruit, err on the full side with the flour.
- Dredge the fruitToss the raisins and sliced citron with a few spoonfuls of the measured flour before folding them in. Otherwise the whole load sinks to the bottom during the long bake.
- AssemblyCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs one at a time, sift the flour with the baking powder and spices, then add flour and milk alternately and fold the floured fruit in last.
- OvenA cake this dense wants a slow oven — 300°F, or 275°F for a deep pan — for two to three hours, tested with a skewer. A moderate 350°F will brown the crust long before the centre sets.
- PansLine whatever you use with a double thickness of parchment up the sides. Divide between two 9-inch tube pans or three large loaf pans; the batter runs to something like nine or ten pounds and will not cook through in a single mass.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks or diced at holiday time, not the fresh fruit. A pound and a half is a lot by current taste; candied orange and lemon peel can carry part of the load.
- Baking powderThe recipe's "large tea-spoons" points to heaped rather than level spoons, and the strength of commercial baking powders then varied. Two level modern teaspoons will do for four cups of flour in a batter this heavy; more will only coarsen the crumb.
- KeepingCooled, wrapped and left a week, it slices far better than it does warm. It will keep for a month in a tin.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was built from contributed receipts, frequently though not invariably attributed, and the signatures map the reach of a Midwestern network that had scattered west of Ohio. "Mrs. Gov. Potts" identifies her by her husband's office rather than her name, the ordinary convention of the period: Benjamin F. Potts was territorial governor of Montana through the 1870s. Three pounds of raisins and a pound and a half of citron also say something about a governor's household — dried fruit and candied peel were bought goods, and a cake on this scale was a statement of supply as much as of appetite.