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Dutch Loaf
Take a quarter of a pound of butter, half a pound of sugar, one pound of dried currants, two table-spoonfuls of cinnamon, a pint of sponge, and as much flour as will form a dough. Make a sponge the evening before you wish to bake a cake, of a tea-cupful and a half of milk, and as much flour stirred into it as will form a thick batter, with a little salt, and one gill of good yeast. In the morning this sponge should be light. Then beat the butter and sugar together, add the cinnamon, currants, and sponge, and flour enough to form a dough. Butter a pan, and when the mixture is light, bake it in an oven about as hot as for bread.
A yeast-raised fruit loaf built on an overnight sponge, written for cooks who kept liquid brewer's yeast and baked in a cooling brick oven. Two things need translating: the yeast quantity and the sponge itself.
- The sponge is the whole recipeEverything depends on the overnight pre-ferment being genuinely light and domed before the butter, sugar and fruit go in. Sugar and fat both slow yeast down, so a sluggish sponge will produce a dense, greasy loaf that never recovers.
- A gill of yeastA gill is a quarter of a pint, roughly half a cup, which reflects the weak liquid barm or brewer's yeast of the period. Modern packaged yeast is far more concentrated; about a teaspoon of instant, or 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry, in the sponge is a reasonable substitute.
- "A pint of sponge"The sponge appears to be measured by volume after rising. A cup and a half of milk with enough flour for a thick batter will make rather more than a pint once risen, so mixing the sponge as directed and measuring off a pint is the safer reading.
- Flour "enough to form a dough"Expect 4 to 5 cups total, including what went into the sponge. Stop while the dough is still slightly tacky; currant loaves stiffened to a firm bread dough bake heavy.
- Two tablespoons of cinnamonThat is what the recipe says, and ground spice of the period may well have been staler or less pure than ours. One to two teaspoons of fresh ground cinnamon will likely give comparable strength in a modern kitchen.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. A pound is a generous fruit-to-flour ratio; toss them in a little of the flour before adding so they distribute rather than sink.
- Oven "about as hot as for bread"The recipe gives no number; a moderately hot oven, in the region of 375 to 400F, is the usual modern reading. Bake 40 to 50 minutes in a buttered loaf pan; the sugar and fruit brown early, so tent with foil if the crust darkens before the centre reaches 195 to 200F.
- Rising and yieldAfter mixing, let the dough rise in the pan until visibly light, an hour to two depending on the room. Makes one large loaf, or two smaller ones, best sliced thin and buttered.
"Dutch loaf" in nineteenth-century English and American cookbooks often meant a sweetened, spiced, yeast-raised fruit bread rather than anything specifically from the Netherlands; the label was applied loosely to breads in the northern European tradition of enriched sponge doughs, and in the United States sometimes to Pennsylvania German baking, where "Dutch" is generally taken to reflect Deutsch, though English "Dutch" was for a long time used loosely of German speakers as well. What is genuinely old here is the method: before chemical leavening became reliable, a sweet cake of this kind was raised with a sponge set the night before, exactly as bread was, and the resulting loaf sat somewhere between bread and cake in a way that modern categories no longer allow for. The instruction to bake it in "an oven about as hot as for bread" is a reminder that readers were still judging heat by comparison rather than by number, and that a household oven was fired once and used for a sequence of dishes as it cooled.