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Plum Cake, Plain, Made with Baker's Dough
Those who are not in the habit of making bread at home may procure a little dough from the baker's, and proceed as follows. Take two pounds of dough. Put it at once into a basin, cover with a thick cloth, and let it rise. Place it on a floured paste-board, sprinkle over it a tea-spoonful of baking-powder, and add a quarter of a pound of lard or butter broken into small pieces, a quarter of a pound of moist sugar, a quarter of a pound of stoned raisins, a quarter of a pound of washed and dried currants, a few caraway-seeds, if liked, and a grated nutmeg. Knead thoroughly with as much lukewarm milk as is necessary. Butter some tins; half fill them with the preparation, place them on the hearth until the dough has risen so that they are three-parts full, then bake the cakes in a well-heated oven. Plunge a knife into the middle of each; when it comes out clean they are done enough. Time to bake, one or two hours, according to the size of the tins. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for three small loaves.
This is a fruit loaf built on ready-made bread dough rather than a batter, so the yeast does most of the lifting. The points that matter are what the Victorian shorthand means and how hard to push the oven.
- Baker's doughA plain lean white bread dough — flour, water, salt, yeast, no fat or sugar. Two pounds is roughly the dough from 1 lb 4 oz flour; a supermarket bakery or pizza counter will sell you an equivalent, or use your own after its first rise.
- Moist sugarUnrefined soft sugar of the period, damp and slightly sticky. Light brown sugar is the closest match; caster or granulated will work but the crumb will be paler and less caramel-scented.
- The nutmegA whole grated nutmeg is around two teaspoons, which is assertive by modern taste. Half a nutmeg is plenty for a 2 lb dough unless you want the loaf frankly spiced.
- The baking powderA single teaspoon against 2 lb of already-risen dough is insurance, not leavening — the sugar and fat weigh the dough down and slow the yeast. It does no harm; skip it if you prefer, and simply allow a longer second rise.
- "Place them on the hearth"The warm stone or brick in front of the range, used as a proofing spot. Any draught-free place at 75-80F does the same job; expect 45 to 90 minutes for the tins to go from half to three-quarters full.
- "A well-heated oven"The book gives no temperatures; a well-heated oven is conventionally read as somewhere around 400F. A sugared, fruited dough browns fast, so it is safer to start hot, around 400F for the first 15 minutes, then drop to 350F for the rest. If the tops colour too quickly, lay foil over them.
- Timing and the knife testThe recipe allows one to two hours "according to the size of the tins" for its three small loaves; in modern 1 lb tins you may well find them done sooner, so start checking early. A clean knife is a fair test; an instant-read thermometer at 200-205F in the centre is surer.
- Kneading in the fat and fruitWork the butter or lard in until the dough stops looking streaky before adding the dried fruit, and add the milk sparingly — the sugar draws out moisture as you knead and an over-slack dough will not hold the fruit in suspension.
- YieldThree small loaves, as stated, each cutting into eight or ten slices. It is at its best the day it is baked and improves with butter thereafter; it stales quickly, as yeasted fruit loaves do.
Buying dough from the baker was ordinary practice in Victorian towns, where many households had no reliable oven of their own and the local bakehouse sold both finished bread and raw dough by weight — the same arrangement that let families send joints and pies to be baked for a few pence. Enriching a piece of that dough with fat, sugar, dried fruit and spice produced the family of loaves known regionally as dough cake, spice loaf or, when the fat is layered rather than kneaded through, lardy cake. Caraway, offered here as optional, was still a common English cake seasoning in the 1870s and 1880s and had largely fallen out of favour by the mid-twentieth century. The "probable cost, 1s. 3d." is characteristic of Cassell's, which priced nearly every entry so that a cook or a young housekeeper could budget a week's baking; the same figure marks the book's audience as people for whom a shilling and threepence was worth stating plainly.