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Thanksgiving Fruit Cake
Six pounds flour, three of butter, three and a half of sugar, an ounce mace, two glasses wine, two glasses brandy, four poundsraisins; half pound citron, six eggs, one pint yeast, small tea-spoon soda put in at last moment. After tea, take all the flour (except one plate for dredging raisins), a small piece butter, and a quart or more of milk, and mix like biscuit; then mix butter and sugar, and at nine o'clock in the evening, if sufficiently light, put one-third of butter and sugar into dough; at twelve add another third, and very early in the morning the remainder; about eleven o'clock, if light enough, begin kneading, and continue for an hour, adding meanwhile all the other ingredients. This will make seven loaves. - Mrs. Woodworth, Springfield, Mass.
This is a yeast-raised fruit cake on a nineteenth-century household scale — six pounds of flour and seven loaves — built over roughly eighteen hours of staged mixing. Read the schedule first: the enrichment goes in by thirds so the dough is never overwhelmed with fat and sugar at once.
- The hinge: enrich in stagesButter and sugar are worked in over three additions across the night because fat and sugar both slow yeast. Adding the whole quantity at the start would give a sluggish, poorly risen dough.
- Scale it downSix pounds of flour is about 22 cups and yields seven loaves. A quarter batch — 1 1/2 lb flour, 12 oz butter, 14 oz sugar, 1 lb raisins, 2 oz citron, 1 to 2 eggs — is the largest most home mixers will handle, and even that is a heavy dough.
- "One pint yeast"This means homemade liquid yeast or barm, a weak, actively fermenting slurry, not a modern dried yeast. There is no reliable conversion; treat the pint as part of the liquid and expect to use ordinary bread yeast in bread-dough proportions, judging progress by the dough rather than the clock.
- "Two glasses"A wine glass of the period held roughly 2 fl oz, so about 1/4 cup each of wine and brandy — but glass sizes were not standard and the measure is genuinely loose. Scaled down proportionally it amounts to a tablespoon or so of each.
- An ounce of maceThat is roughly 4 to 5 tablespoons of ground mace for the full batch, assertive but in keeping with period spicing. Mace is now sold in small jars at some expense; ground nutmeg comes from the same fruit and is the usual substitute, though the flavour is not identical.
- Soda at the last momentThe teaspoon of soda is not the leavening. After eighteen hours of fermentation the dough has gone slightly sour, and the soda neutralises that acidity; add it with the final kneading and get the loaves into the pans promptly.
- Dredging the fruitThe plate of flour reserved at the start coats the raisins so they suspend in the dough instead of sinking. Do it just before the fruit goes in, at the end of the kneading, and fold rather than knead once it is added.
- Baking, which the recipe omitsNo oven instruction is given because the cook was expected to know her own. Loaves this rich and heavy want a moderate oven, 325 to 350F, for well over an hour, tented with foil once the top has coloured; a skewer to the centre is the only dependable test.
Before chemical leavening was cheap and reliable, large celebration cakes were raised with barm from the brewing or bread-making, and the "great cake" of the English and colonial tradition — a spiced, fruited, yeast-risen loaf fermented overnight — is the ancestor of this one. What makes Mrs. Woodworth's version interesting is that it sits in a transitional moment: she keeps the old all-night schedule of feeding butter and sugar into a living dough, then adds a modern teaspoon of soda at the very end to sweeten out the sourness that long fermentation brings. The recipe survives with its quantities and midnight timetable intact, seven loaves and all.