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Plum Cake, Excellent
Mix three tea-spoonfuls of baking-powder and half a tea-spoonful of salt with one pound of flour. Rub into this half a pound of butter, lard, or sweet beef dripping, or portions of each. Add three-quarters of a pound of washed, dried, and picked currants, a quarter of a pound of stoned and chopped raisins, half a pound of moist sugar, two ounces of candied peel cut into narrow strips, and a small nutmeg, grated. Mix these ingredients thoroughly. Whisk two eggs for five or six minutes. Mix with them four drops of almond essence and a little milk new-milk-warm. Stir this into the flour, and add as much milk as will make it into a light dough. Put it into a large buttered tin, or two small ones, and bake immediately for one or two hours, according to the size of the tins. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for a good-sized cake.
This is a rubbed-in fruit cake rather than a creamed one, which makes it fast but also means the batter waits for nobody. Cassell's gives no oven temperature at all, so the numbers below are the useful additions.
- Oven temperatureBake at 325F (160C) for a large cake, 350F (175C) for two small ones. A pound of flour carrying a pound of fruit plus half a pound of sugar takes heat slowly; if the top colours before the centre sets, cover it loosely with foil.
- "Bake immediately"This is the hinge. The lift comes chiefly from the baking powder, which begins working the moment the liquid goes in, with some help from the whisked eggs. Have the tins buttered and lined and the oven up to temperature before you mix.
- Moist sugarLight brown soft sugar. Victorian "moist" sugar was partially refined and still damp with molasses; ordinary granulated will work but gives a paler, drier crumb.
- Sweet beef drippingFresh beef dripping saved from a roast, not rendered suet and not anything that has been used for frying onions or fish. Butter alone is entirely fine, and a half-and-half mix of butter and lard gives the shortest crumb.
- New-milk-warmBlood heat, roughly 100F (37C) - the temperature of milk straight from the cow. Warm, not hot: milk hot enough to be uncomfortable to the finger risks starting to cook the eggs.
- A small nutmegA whole nutmeg grated yields about 2 to 3 teaspoons; a small one, nearer 1 1/2 to 2. That is a lot by modern taste, so start with a teaspoon if you are unsure.
- Almond essenceModern extracts vary in strength, so four drops is a very small quantity. Start with a few drops and use no more than 1/4 teaspoon.
- Tins and timingOne deep 8-inch round tin, or two 6-inch, both lined with buttered paper. Reckon on about 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 hours for the large cake and 55 to 70 minutes for the small; a skewer into the centre should come out clean of wet batter, though fruit will make it sticky.
- YieldThe large cake gives 12 to 16 slices. Wrapped well it keeps a week, and improves after a day.
The "plums" in a plum cake have almost never been plums: from the seventeenth century onward the word covered raisins, currants and other dried fruit generally, which is why this recipe contains three-quarters of a pound of currants and no plums at all. What marks it as late Victorian is the method. An older plum cake was raised with yeast or with a dozen well-beaten eggs and hours of arm work; here two eggs and three teaspoonfuls of baking powder do the job, and the fat is rubbed into the flour as for pastry. Commercial baking powder became cheap and reliable in British kitchens from the 1850s and 60s, and cookery dictionaries like Cassell's promptly filled up with cakes of this kind - sturdy, keeping, sliceable, the sort of thing kept in a tin for tea and unexpected callers. The frank permission to use lard or beef dripping instead of butter, and the printed "probable cost, 2s.", are aimed squarely at a household counting the week's expenditure.