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Fruit Cake
To make a rich fruit cake which will keep for a year or more, rub one pound of sugar and one pound of butter together to a cream, and add half a tea-cupful of treacle. Beat the whites and yolks of ten eggs separately, and add them to the butter and sugar; then by degrees put in two-thirds of a pound of flour with a tea-spoonful of cream of tartar sifted in it. Dissolve half a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda in a little boiling water, and add it also, then a tea-spoonful of ground cloves, half a tea-spoonful of mace, one grated nutmeg, a wineglass of brandy, the juice and grated rind of a lemon, and last of all, one pound of raisins stoned and chopped, and two pounds of currants, well picked over, mixed with one-third of a pound of flour. Have ready half a pound of citron cut in thin slices. Put a layer of the cake into the baking-tin, then a layer of citron, and so on until the cake is all in. Bake in a moderate oven for at least three hours. Probable cost, 4s.
A keeping cake of the old school: about six pounds of batter, three pounds of it dried fruit, held together by a pound of flour and ten eggs. Almost everything that can go wrong here is a matter of heat and time.
- Oven temperatureCassell's gives no temperatures at all; "moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 325-350F. A cake this dense and sugary will scorch over three hours at the top of that range, so bake at 300-315F, with the tin double-lined in parchment and a loose sheet of foil laid over the top once the surface has coloured.
- Tin and yieldThe original gives no tin size at all. This is a large mixture, something like eight pounds all told, so allow a deep tin of 10 inches or more, or divide it between two smaller ones; err on the deep side.
- Doneness, not clock timeThree hours is a minimum, not a target. Test with a long skewer at the centre and check the internal temperature: 200-205F means done. A cake pulled early will sink and stay wet in the middle, and a wet middle will not keep for a year.
- TreacleHalf a tea-cupful is about 3 fl oz. Use dark treacle or unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and was not what a Victorian grocer sold as treacle. Golden syrup is too mild and too pale.
- Carbonate of soda and cream of tartarThis is homemade baking powder, from a period when many cooks still mixed their own. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder in place of both works, though the soda-and-boiling-water step also helps darken the crumb.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, sold with the raisins, never fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Two pounds is a large quantity; pick them over and rinse and dry them if they are dusty, as the instruction to "well pick over" assumes stems and grit.
- CitronCandied citron peel, still available from baking suppliers around Christmas. Candied mixed peel is the usual substitute. The layering is deliberate: slices are laid flat between layers of batter rather than stirred through, so each cut shows bands of translucent peel.
- Wineglass of brandyRoughly 2 fl oz. Once the cake is cool, more brandy brushed over the surface every week or two is what actually makes it keep; wrap in parchment and then foil, and store in a tin, not in plastic.
- SpiceOne whole grated nutmeg is a lot by modern palates, close to two teaspoons. Ground cloves and mace both lose their edge over a long bake and a long keep, which is why the quantities look heavy.
Cassell's calls it fruit cake, but this is the English keeping cake descended from the boiled and baked plum cakes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the same lineage that produced wedding and Christmas cake. The point of the form is preservation: sugar, butter, dried fruit and spirits together leave very little free water for spoilage organisms, which is why a cake like this could genuinely be made in autumn and cut at the following year's celebration. The homemade leavening of cream of tartar plus carbonate of soda cannot by itself date the entry, since that combination appears in cookery books across a long span, and the note of "probable cost, 4s." is characteristic of Cassell's, which priced its recipes so a household could judge them against a weekly budget. Four shillings was a serious outlay for a Victorian family, and it tells you this was an occasion cake rather than a tea-table standby.