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School Cake
Take four pounds of flour, twelve ounces of clarified fat, twelve ounces of moist sugar, one pound of good raisins, stoned and halved, one ounce of yeast, a pint and a half of milk and water in equal proportions, a tea-spoonful of salt, the same of mixed spice, two beaten eggs, and a few ounces of candied peel. The yeast and a portion of the liquid are to be mixed with a little sugar, and put to the flour to form a leaven as for bread. When risen the fat should be melted in the rest of the liquid, and added with the eggs, etc., to the flour, and the whole mixed and left to rise well; divide into two cakes, and bake for about two and a half hours in a moderate oven. Probable cost, 2s.
A yeast-raised fruit bread of the plainest institutional kind, scaled for a schoolroom rather than a household. Everything here works in a modern kitchen, but the quantities and the vocabulary need translating.
- Scale firstFour pounds of flour is roughly 14 to 14.5 cups, and the finished batch weighs something on the order of eight pounds — two cakes of about 4 lb each, or 30 to 40 slices. Halving or quartering the recipe is sensible unless you are feeding a crowd.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined soft brown sugar, damp and clumping. Light brown sugar is the closest current equivalent; white granulated will work but gives a paler, blander crumb.
- Clarified fatMost likely clarified beef dripping or lard, the cheap fat a school kitchen had on hand; the recipe does not specify. Twelve ounces to four pounds of flour is a lean cake by modern standards. Clarified butter gives a better flavour; the texture stays the same.
- Yeast quantityOne ounce is fresh compressed yeast, about 28 g. Substitute roughly 1/3 oz (10 g, about 3 teaspoons) of instant dried yeast, or 4 teaspoons of active dry, and add it to the sponge stage as written.
- Imperial liquidA pint and a half in this book is 30 imperial fluid ounces, about 850 ml — noticeably more than 1 1/2 US pints. Half milk, half water, warmed to blood heat before it meets the yeast.
- Mixed spiceBritish mixed spice: mostly cinnamon, coriander seed, nutmeg, allspice, ginger and clove. Pumpkin-pie spice is a workable stand-in. A single teaspoon in four pounds of flour is a whisper, not a statement.
- Oven and timingA moderate oven is 350F, but for a cake of this mass 325F for the full time is safer or the crust will set long before the middle. Two and a half hours is not an exaggeration for a 3 1/2 lb loaf; cover the top with foil once it has coloured, and take it out at an internal temperature of 200-205F.
- The hingeThis is bread dough, not batter, and it needs both risings to be full. The sponge stage does the leavening work; the fat, eggs and fruit added afterwards slow the yeast considerably, so allow the second rise to nearly double however long that takes — an hour and a half is not unusual in a cool kitchen.
- Fruit handlingToss the halved raisins and chopped peel in a little of the flour and work them in at the very end. Added earlier, they tear the developing gluten and the crumb goes dense.
"School cake" seems to be less a specific confection than a category: a large, cheap, yeast-leavened fruit bread baked in institutional quantities for schools, orphanages and treats. The economics explain the recipe. Butter and eggs were the expensive parts of a Victorian cake, so this one uses twelve ounces of dripping and two eggs to four pounds of flour, and lets yeast rather than creamed butter or chemical leaven do the lifting — the same logic that produced lardy cake, Yorkshire tea cake and the various regional "plain cakes." The stated cost of two shillings is the point of the entry, and Cassell's prints such figures throughout precisely so a housekeeper or matron could budget. It belongs to a long British tradition in which "cake" meant enriched bread; the sharp modern distinction between the two only hardened as baking powder and cheap sugar spread through the second half of the nineteenth century.