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Wedding Cake
Fifty eggs, five pounds sugar, five of flour, five of butter, fifteen of raisins, three of citron, ten of currants, pint brandy, fourth ounce cloves, ounce cinnamon, four of mace, four of nutmeg. This makes forty-three and a half pounds, and keeps twenty years.
This is a pound-cake formula scaled to a village wedding: 43½ pounds of batter, most of it fruit. Everything after the eggs is given in pounds unless the unit is stated, and the spices are in ounces.
- Scale it down firstDivide by eight and you get a manageable large cake: 6 eggs, 10 oz each sugar, flour and butter, 30 oz raisins, 6 oz citron, 20 oz currants, 2 oz brandy, and the spices in the same proportion (about 1/32 oz cloves, 1/8 oz cinnamon, and 1/2 oz each mace and nutmeg -- the last two still come to several teaspoons apiece). Divide by sixteen for a single loaf.
- Fifty eggsEggs were ungraded then and often ran smaller than a modern large egg. Weigh rather than count: at roughly ten shelled eggs to the pound, fifty come to about 5 lb, which would line up with the 5 lb each of sugar, flour and butter -- a pound cake in the literal sense, though the fruit far outweighs the base.
- Currants and citronCurrants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. Citron is candied citron peel, sold in blocks and cut into dice; candied orange and lemon peel substitute without complaint.
- The spice loadFour ounces each of mace and nutmeg is roughly a cup of ground spice apiece, and a quarter ounce of cloves against an ounce of cinnamon is deliberate — cloves dominate quickly. Grate nutmeg fresh; preground nutmeg at this quantity turns dusty.
- Creaming is the hingeThere is no leavening at all. The rise comes entirely from air beaten into the butter and sugar and from the eggs, so cream the butter and sugar until visibly pale and add the eggs slowly enough that the batter never breaks. Flour the fruit lightly before folding it in so it stays suspended.
- OvenBake low and long: 275–300F. A deep 8-inch pan of this batter wants 3 to 4 hours, a large one longer. Line the pan with two or three thicknesses of parchment and tent the top once it has colored; at this density the outside will burn well before the center sets.
- KeepingTwenty years is a boast, but the principle holds — sugar, fat and spirit make this cake keep for a year or more. Cool completely, brush with brandy, wrap in spirit-dampened cloth and then in foil or parchment, and store in a tin somewhere cool. Rewet the cloth every few weeks for the first couple of months.
- YieldThe full recipe is a catering job: 43½ pounds cuts into something over 300 small wedding slices. A modern household almost never wants more than an eighth of it.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Ohio) belongs to a moment when the wedding cake was still the dark, spirit-soaked fruit cake inherited from English practice rather than the white tiered confection that gradually overtook it across the later nineteenth century. Fruit and spice were the expensive things in a Midwestern pantry, and a cake carrying fifteen pounds of raisins and a pint of brandy advertised a family's means as plainly as the bride's dress did. The keeping quality was not incidental: slices were traditionally boxed for guests to take home and a piece was often put by for a first anniversary or a future christening.