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Plum Loaf, Plain
Put two pounds of best flour into a bowl, and mix with it half a tea-spoonful of salt, half a pound of picked and dried currants, four ounces of moist sugar, and half a nutmeg, grated. Dissolve half an ounce of German yeast very gradually in three-quarters of a pint of lukewarm milk, in which has been dissolved four ounces of butter or good beef dripping. Stir this into the flour, and knead it to a smooth paste. Put a cover over the bowl, and set the dough to rise for about an hour. Make it up into a loaf, put it into a buttered tin, and bake in a moderate oven. If preferred, a table-spoonful of solid brewer's yeast or two dessert-spoonfuls of baking-powder may be used instead of the German yeast. In order to ascertain whether the loaf is sufficiently baked, put a skewer into it; if it comes out clean and dry, the cake is done. It is perhaps a better plan to knead in the sugar, currants, and spice after the dough has risen (as in PLUM CAKE, PLAIN).
A plain enriched fruit bread rather than a cake, leavened with yeast and mixed by hand in a single bowl. The quantities are large by modern standards and the ingredient names need translating.
- Scale and yieldTwo pounds of flour is about 900 g, roughly 7 cups, and makes one very large loaf or two standard 2 lb tins. Two tins bake more evenly and each gives 10-12 slices.
- German yeastThis is fresh compressed baker's yeast. Half an ounce is about 14 g fresh, or roughly 1½ teaspoons of instant dried yeast. The instruction to dissolve it "very gradually" matters less with modern yeast, but the milk must be lukewarm and not hot, or the butter fat will be fine and the yeast will not.
- Three-quarters of a pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is 15 fl oz, about 425 ml. Hold back a little and add it as needed; flour absorbency varies.
- Moist sugarVictorian moist sugar was an unrefined soft brown sugar. Light brown sugar is the closest match; white granulated will work but gives a paler, flatter flavour.
- Picked and dried currants"Picked" means stalks and grit removed, which packaged dried currants no longer need. If they are very dry, a brief soak and thorough drying stops them stealing moisture from the dough.
- The hinge: add the fruit after the riseThe closing sentence is the important one. Sugar and currants both slow yeast, and whole fruit tears the developing gluten. Knead the plain dough, let it rise an hour, then work in the sugar, currants and nutmeg before shaping.
- Moderate oven350F / 175C. A loaf this size needs about 50-60 minutes; the skewer test in the original is sound, and an internal temperature of 190-200F confirms it. Cover the top with foil if it colours before the centre sets.
- The baking-powder versionTwo dessert-spoonfuls of baking powder makes a different thing entirely: a quick bread that must go straight into the tin and into the oven with no rising time. Do not follow the hour's rest if you take that route.
- Beef drippingStill available from butchers and worth trying for a savoury, old-fashioned crumb. Butter gives the softer, sweeter loaf most modern palates expect.
"Plum" in British baking has meant dried fruit rather than plums since at least the seventeenth century, a survival from the days when raisins and currants were all lumped together as plums; plum pudding and plum cake carry the same fossil. This loaf sits at the humble end of that family: a plain bread dough enriched with a little fat, sugar and fruit, of the sort a household baked when currant cake proper was too rich or too dear. The offering of three leavenings in one recipe, German yeast, brewer's yeast or baking powder, is a snapshot of a kitchen in transition. Compressed German yeast reached British bakers in quantity in the later nineteenth century and was valued for its reliability over the barm skimmed from brewing, while chemical baking powder, commercially available from the 1840s, was increasingly taken up in domestic baking. The book quietly assumes its reader might have any of the three to hand.