Home › The Principles of Cookery › Ruthven Cake
Ruthven Cake
Heat three pints of milk, and stir into this, until dissolved, eight ounces of fresh butter. Let the liquor cool, then mix with it a quarter of a stone of flour, six ounces of powdered and sifted loaf sugar, the thin rind of two lemons finely minced, a pinch of powdered cinnamon, a pound of picked and dried currants, six well-beaten eggs, and three large spoonfuls of fresh yeast. Knead the mixture thoroughly to a smooth dough. Cover the bowl with a cloth, and set it in a warm place for the paste to rise. It will take about three hours. Put the dough into buttered tins, and bake these in a well-heated oven. Time to bake, an hour and a half. Probable cost, 1s. 7d. per cake. Sufficient for two good-sized cakes.
A large yeast-raised currant cake of the type that stands between bread and cake. The quantities are enormous by modern standards and one of them needs judgement before you begin.
- A quarter of a stone of flourA stone is 14 lb, so this is 3 lb 8 oz of flour, about 1.6 kg. It makes two very large cakes; halving the whole recipe is sensible for a domestic oven.
- The liquid is on the loose sideThree imperial pints is 60 fl oz, roughly 1.7 litres, and with six eggs that gives a very slack mixture against 3 lb 8 oz of flour. Hold back a third of the milk and add it only as needed to reach a soft but kneadable dough.
- Fresh yeast"Three large spoonfuls of fresh yeast" means barm or compressed baker's yeast, not dried. For 3 lb 8 oz of flour, roughly 1 to 1.5 oz fresh yeast is a reasonable modern equivalent, or about a third of that weight in instant dried.
- Milk temperatureHeat the milk only enough to melt the butter, then cool it to blood heat before the yeast goes in. Milk much above about 130F starts to kill the yeast, which is presumably why the original insists the liquor be cooled.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold in hard cones and broken up, hence "powdered and sifted." Ordinary caster or granulated sugar is the direct replacement, weight for weight.
- A well-heated ovenFor a rich, heavy yeast cake a moderate oven, somewhere around 350F, is a safer modern reading than a bread oven's blast, though the book gives no figure. An hour and a half at that heat suits a large tin; cover the top with foil if it colours before the centre is set.
- Currants and rind"Picked" currants means stalks and grit removed, unnecessary with modern packaged fruit. The original adds the currants and minced lemon rind before kneading; if you prefer, work them in towards the end of the kneading instead, which handles the fruit more gently.
- The riseThree hours may reflect a cool kitchen as much as the heavily enriched dough. In a modern warm room expect closer to two, and give the shaped cakes a second proving in the tins before they go in.
- YieldThe ingredients come to something like 10 lb of dough, so two cakes of roughly 4 to 4 1/2 lb each, cutting into a dozen or more slices apiece.
The method here is essentially bread dough enriched with butter, eggs, sugar and dried fruit, which puts it in the same family as the Selkirk bannock, the Yorkshire spice loaf and the various "yeast cakes" that persisted in Scotland and the north of England long after chemical raising agents became cheap. The name is Scottish, Ruthven being both a family name and a scattering of places in Perthshire, Angus and Inverness-shire, though no attribution is given and the connection is not documented; Victorian cookery books attached place and family names to fruit cakes with a free hand. The costing of 1s. 7d. per cake is a reminder of what such books were for: they were sold to households that needed to know whether a dish was worth the currants before committing three pints of milk to it.