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Christmas Cake
Beat one pound of butter into a cream, and mix with it three eggs well beaten, two pounds of flour, one pound of currants picked and dried, one pound of sugar, five small tea-spoonfuls of baking-powder, and a quarter of a pint of milk. Put the mixture into a buttered dish, and bake it in a moderate oven. This is a very good cake if intended to be used soon, but it soon gets dry, and should not be kept in a damp place. Time to bake, about two hours. Sufficient for a good-sized cake. Probable cost, 2s. 8d.
A plain, eggless-by-modern-standards Christmas cake leavened with baking powder rather than yeast or a long fruit soak. The proportions are stiff, and the book admits the cake dries quickly.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 325-350F (165-175C). At the lower end of that range a cake this size will take the full two hours; check from 90 minutes with a skewer.
- Quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about 140 ml or a generous half cup. That is very little liquid for 2 lb of flour, and the mixture will be closer to a stiff paste than a batter.
- ConsistencyThree eggs and 5 oz of milk cannot bring 2 lb of flour and 1 lb of butter to a dropping consistency. Expect to add milk by the spoonful until the mixture falls reluctantly from the spoon.
- Creaming orderThe instruction to cream the butter alone and then add eggs and sugar separately gives less lift than modern practice. Creaming butter and sugar together first, then beating in the eggs, will do the same job better.
- Currants picked and driedDried currants once arrived with stalks, grit and small stones. Modern packaged currants need only a quick rinse if they look dusty, and should be dried and tossed in a little of the flour so they do not sink.
- Baking powderFive small teaspoons for 2 lb of flour is broadly comparable to modern quantities, if anything on the low side, and Victorian baking powders varied in strength. Four level teaspoons of a modern powder is a reasonable starting figure.
- TinA "buttered dish" was probably a deep dish or tin. A 9-10 inch round or 8 inch square tin, buttered and lined with parchment on base and sides, suits this quantity; lay a loose sheet of paper or foil over the top once the surface has coloured.
- Yield and keepingThis makes a large cake, 16-20 slices. The book is right that it stales fast: with no treacle, honey or spirit to hold moisture, eat it within three or four days or freeze it in slices.
This is a plain version of a Christmas cake: no candied peel, no almonds, no brandy, no long-keeping richness, just butter, flour, sugar and currants raised with baking powder. Chemically leavened cakes became practical for domestic cooks as commercial baking powders spread through British kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the older route to a Christmas cake was a yeast-risen or heavily egg-beaten fruit mixture that took far more labour. The frank warning that it "soon gets dry" is in keeping with the book's practical tone. A cake of this type is closer to what a Victorian cook would have called a plain currant or plum cake than to an iced centrepiece.