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Raisin Cake
Beat half a pound of sweet butter to a cream. Add half a pound of powdered and sifted sugar, half a pound of flour, a pinch of salt, a salt-spoonful of grated nutmeg, three eggs well-beaten--the yolks and whites separately--a table-spoonful of brandy, and as much soda as will lie on a sixpence, dissolved in a wine-glassful of hot milk. Beat the mixture till it is quite light. Stone half a pound of Muscatel raisins, chop them small, roll them in flour, and stir them into the cake. Line a small cake-tin with buttered paper, three-parts fill it with the batter, and bake in a well-heated oven. In order to ascertain when the cake is done enough put a skewer into the middle of it, and if when drawn out it is bright and dry, the cake is done. If preferred, commoner raisins may of course be used, but the Muscatels are very much superior to them in flavour and quality. Time to bake, three-quarters of an hour to one hour. Probable cost, 2s. 3d.
This is a pound cake in all but name, with the butter, sugar and flour in equal weight and a small amount of soda to lighten it. The measurements are straightforward once the Victorian units are translated.
- The weightsHalf a pound each of butter, sugar and flour is 1 cup butter (2 sticks), about 1 1/8 cups sugar, and about 2 cups flour. Half a pound of raisins is roughly 1 1/2 cups once chopped.
- "Powdered and sifted sugar"In this period powdered sugar means granulated sugar ground fine — what is now sold as caster or superfine. It is not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and will give a dense, pasty crumb.
- Soda on a sixpenceA sixpence was a small thin coin about three-quarters of an inch across, so this is a scant 1/4 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. With no acid in the batter beyond a spoonful of brandy, the soda is doing very little; the lift here comes almost entirely from the creamed butter and the beaten whites.
- Wine-glassful and salt-spoonfulA wine-glass in Victorian cookery books is about 2 fl oz (1/4 cup), and a salt-spoon is 1/4 teaspoon. The milk is warmed only to dissolve the soda — do not add it hot enough to melt the creamed butter.
- The eggsThe yolks and whites are beaten separately for a reason, but the recipe then says to beat the mixture till light, which would knock the whites flat. Beat the yolks in with the sugar and butter, and fold the whipped whites in gently at the end, just before the floured raisins.
- Muscatel raisinsThese were sold in seeded clusters, hence the instruction to stone them. Muscat raisins sold today have generally had the seeds removed already, so check before stoning; the flouring still matters, as it is meant to keep the fruit suspended rather than sinking to the base.
- Oven and tinFor a rich butter cake of this size, a moderate oven of about 325–350F is a reasonable modern reading of "a well-heated oven". Use a 7- or 8-inch round tin or a 2 lb loaf tin lined with buttered parchment, filled no more than three-quarters, as the recipe directs. Check at 45 minutes; the recipe itself allows up to the full hour.
- YieldOne cake of about 10 to 12 slices. It keeps well wrapped for several days and improves on the second day.
This is a pound cake with fruit, made on the old equal-weights principle that predates reliable scales and printed measures. The interesting detail is the insistence on Muscatels. These were dried Muscat grapes, associated above all with Málaga in Spain, sold pressed into flat boxes or still on the stem in "clusters" for the dessert table, and they carried a distinctly perfumed flavour that the cheaper Valencia and Smyrna raisins did not. Because they held their seeds, every cake of this kind began with the tedious job of stoning fruit by hand; commercial seeding machinery and the rise of the seedless Thompson grape in California later in the century made the instruction obsolete. The pinch of soda dissolved in hot milk reflects the spread of chemical leavening into cakes that an earlier generation would have raised with eggs and beating alone. The costing of 2s. 3d. is a reminder that Cassell's was written for households keeping accounts.