Home › The Principles of Cookery › Stranger's Cake, or Polly's Cake
Stranger's Cake, or Polly's Cake
Rub half a pound of butter or sweet dripping into a pound of flour. Add a small salt-spoonful of salt, three heaped tea-spoonfuls of baking-powder, a pound of ground rice, half a pound of moist sugar, a pound of picked currants or sultanas, and two ounces of candied peel. A little spice may be added if approved. Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly. Stir into the cake four well-whisked eggs and a cupful of milk. Bake immediately in a moderate oven. Time to bake, two hours and a half or more. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. for a cake this size.
A very large, very plain fruit cake of the rubbed-in type — closer to a rock-solid keeping cake than to a modern sponge. The weights add up to roughly four and a half pounds of batter, which is what justifies the two-and-a-half-hour bake.
- Oven temperatureA "moderate oven" is conventionally read as about 350F/180C, though period usage varies; at this size and depth the outside will be dark long before the middle sets. Bake at 325F/160C, and cover the top loosely with foil or paper once it has coloured.
- Ground riceThis is rice flour, ground somewhat coarser than wheat flour. It gives the short, slightly sandy crumb that defines the cake; substituting more wheat flour produces an entirely different, springier result.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar. Light soft brown sugar is the closest match; granulated will not dissolve properly in so stiff a mixture.
- Sweet drippingClarified beef or pork fat, saved from roasting and free of savoury sediment — "sweet" here means not rancid or meaty. Butter is the straightforward choice now; lard works if you want the period texture.
- ConsistencyFour eggs and a cup of milk into two pounds of dry flours makes a very heavy batter that barely drops from the spoon. Add milk a little at a time beyond the cupful until it falls reluctantly rather than sticking fast, or the centre will bake dry.
- Tin and timingUse a lined and double-papered 9-inch round deep tin, or split between two 7-inch tins and bake around 1 hour 20 minutes. "Bake immediately" matters: the baking powder starts working as soon as the milk goes in.
- DonenessIgnore the stated time as an instruction and test instead — a skewer into the centre should come out clean, and the cake should have stopped sizzling audibly at the edges.
- Yield and keepingAbout 20 to 24 slices. Wrapped in paper in a tin it should keep a week or two, and it is generally better after a day or two.
The name is usually explained as recording a domestic habit rather than a place or a person: a plain, sturdy fruit cake mixed from storecupboard staples, baked in quantity, and kept in a tin against the arrival of an unannounced visitor — the cake you could always offer a stranger. That reading is traditional rather than documented. The details do suggest why such a cake was thought thrifty: sweet dripping may replace the butter outright, ground rice bulks out the wheat flour, and chemical baking powder saves the labour of beating a rich creamed batter. The alternative title "Polly's Cake" looks like a household attribution of the kind these dictionaries carried, and the original Polly is unrecoverable. The "probable cost" in shillings and pence is a standard Cassell's feature.