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Plum Cake, Made with Soda
Rub a quarter of a pound of butter into a pound of flour, add a pinch of salt, half a pound of sugar, half a pound of washed and dried currants, and two ounces of candied peel cut into shreds. Mix these ingredients thoroughly, then beat them into a paste together with half a pint of milk. Dissolve a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda in two table-spoonfuls of warm milk. Stir this into the dough, and beat it again thoroughly. Put it into a buttered tin, and bake in a well-heated oven from an hour and a half to two hours. Sufficient for a good-sized cake. Probable cost, 1s. 4d.
A plain fruit cake leavened with soda rather than eggs or yeast — cheap, quick and dense by design. A few of the original's assumptions need translating.
- The hinge: soda needs an acidA teaspoonful of carbonate of soda (bicarbonate of soda, i.e. baking soda) stirred into fresh sweet milk has almost nothing to react with, and will leave a faint soapy taste. Milk that had begun to turn would have supplied the acid; buttermilk or soured milk does the same job today, or use baking powder in place of the soda, allowing rather more than the teaspoonful given.
- MeasuresHalf a pint imperial is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. A pound of flour is roughly 3½ cups; the butter is 4 oz (1 stick), the sugar and the currants 8 oz each.
- "Well-heated oven"For a cake this size baking 1½ to 2 hours, read that as 325–350F. Any hotter and the outside sets and darkens long before the centre is done. Cover the top loosely with foil if it colours early.
- Tin and yield"A good-sized cake" is about 3 lb of batter: a deep 8-inch round tin or a large loaf tin, buttered and, better, lined with paper. Twelve to sixteen slices.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, not fresh blackcurrants or red currants. Washing and drying was to remove grit and stem fragments from unpackaged fruit; modern packaged currants need only a quick check. Toss them in a spoonful of the flour to keep them from sinking.
- Candied peelTwo ounces of whole candied citron, orange or lemon peel, shredded by hand. Supermarket mixed peel is already chopped and much sweeter; use the same weight.
- Consistency"Beat them into a paste" means a stiff, spoonable batter rather than a pourable one. Once the soda goes in, work quickly and get it into the oven — the lift begins immediately and does not wait.
- No plums, no eggsExpect a close, scone-like crumb rather than the moist richness of a creamed, egg-built fruit cake. It is best eaten within a day or two, buttered.
English "plum cake" has contained no plums since at least the seventeenth century: plum came to mean any dried fruit, chiefly raisins and currants, as it still does in plum pudding. The grand versions were built on many eggs and long creaming, and were expensive; this one is the thrifty cousin, and it reflects how quickly chemical leavening spread through British kitchens after bicarbonate of soda became cheap and widely sold in the mid-nineteenth century. Soda cakes let a household produce something festive-looking in an afternoon without eggs, without yeast and without a long proving. The costing of 1s. 4d. is the book's usual practice, and marks this as a recipe judged first by economy.