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Plum Cake
Mix a pinch of salt and a dessert-spoonful of baking-powder with one pound of flour. Rub into this a quarter of a pound of good beef dripping, and add a quarter of a pound of picked and dried currants, one ounce of finely minced lemon-peel, and half a nutmeg grated. Make the mixture into a stiff dough with new milk, pour it into a buttered tin, and bake immediately for about an hour. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for a moderate-sized cake.
A plain, thrifty currant cake raised with baking powder rather than yeast or eggs. The original gives no oven temperature and no tin size, so both need supplying.
- OvenThe original gives no temperature. Around 350F (180C) for about an hour works as a modern equivalent; a skewer to the centre should come out clean.
- TinOne pound of flour plus the additions makes a large mixture; a big loaf tin or a round tin of roughly 7-8 inches, erring on the larger side. Butter it well and line the base.
- Beef drippingThe fat here is rendered beef fat, not butter, and it gives the cake a savoury, close, scone-like character. Butter or lard works if you would rather; the texture will be lighter and the flavour less distinctive.
- New milk"New milk" is fresh whole milk straight from the cow, unskimmed and not soured. Whole milk is the equivalent. Expect to need somewhere around half a pint, added gradually.
- Baking powderA dessertspoon is about 2 teaspoons. Victorian baking powders varied more than modern ones, so 2 teaspoons for a pound of flour is on the generous side but workable.
- "Pour it into a buttered tin"A stiff dough will not pour. Scrape and press it in, then level the top with a wet spoon.
- Bake immediatelyThis matters more than anything else in the method. The baking powder starts working the moment the milk goes in, and a cake with no eggs and no creamed butter has nothing else lifting it.
- No sugarThere is none in the list; the sweetness comes from the currants and peel alone. It reads as a tea-bread rather than a cake by current expectations.
- YieldAbout ten to twelve slices. Best eaten the day it is made, or split and buttered thereafter.
"Plum" in English baking means dried fruit, not fresh plums — a usage that survives in plum pudding and plum duff, and dates from a time when "plum" covered raisins and currants generally. Grand plum cakes were rich with butter, eggs, brandy and pounded almonds; this is the frugal end of the same family. The use of beef dripping is the tell: in a period when a household rendered the fat from its roasts and kept it in a crock, dripping was free where butter cost money. The costing of tenpence, given as a matter of course throughout the book, was aimed at readers keeping household accounts to the penny.