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Sultana Cake
Rub three ounces of butter into eight ounces of flour, add four ounces of sultanas picked, and four ounces of castor sugar. Beat up two eggs well, strain them, and add a table-spoonful of milk to them. Add to the other ingredients, and incorporate thoroughly by beating for a few minutes. Line a cake-tin with buttered paper, and pour in the mixture, which should about half fill it. Bake in a moderate oven for three-quarters of an hour, covering the top with buttered paper when half done. Probable cost, 1s.
A plain Victorian fruit cake built on the rubbing-in method, with no chemical raising agent at all. Everything depends on how much air the eggs and the beating carry into a very stiff mixture.
- No baking powderThe recipe relies entirely on beaten eggs and the aeration of rubbing butter into flour, so expect a close, firm, biscuit-like crumb rather than a light sponge. If you want a softer cake, use self-raising flour or add a teaspoon of baking powder to the plain flour, but understand that you are changing the character of the thing.
- The mixture will not pourThe mixture will barely pour -- two eggs and one tablespoon of milk against half a pound of flour gives a stiff paste, closer to a rock-cake dough than a batter, despite the recipe's word "pour". Spoon it into the tin and level the top; adding extra liquid to reach a pouring consistency risks the fruit sinking.
- Weights to volume3 oz butter is about 6 tablespoons, 8 oz flour is roughly 13/4 cups, and 4 oz each of sultanas and sugar is about 3/4 cup and a scant 2/3 cup respectively. Weighing is markedly more reliable here given how tight the liquid is.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or baker's sugar. Ordinary granulated will work but dissolves less readily in so little liquid; a few seconds in a food processor solves it.
- Sultanas, pickedSultanas are golden raisins. "Picked" means going through them for stalks and grit, which modern packaged fruit rarely needs; a quick rinse and thorough drying is enough, and tossing them in a spoonful of the measured flour helps keep them suspended.
- A moderate ovenUsually taken as about 350F/175C, though period equivalents vary. Forty-five minutes at that heat would suit a cake of roughly 6 to 7 inches across, filled half full as directed; the recipe does not specify a tin, so a deeper, narrower one will need longer and a shallower one less. Test with a skewer.
- Buttered paperLine the tin with parchment rather than greased paper, and use a loose sheet laid over the top at the halfway mark to stop the surface colouring before the centre sets. This is the Victorian equivalent of tenting with foil.
- Yield and keepingAbout eight to ten slices. Being relatively low in fat by modern standards it stales quickly; it is at its best on the day and good with butter thereafter.
Cassell's costing of "1s." places this squarely among the everyday cakes of a late-Victorian household rather than the rich, brandy-soaked fruit cakes kept for Christmas and weddings. Sultanas -- seedless white grapes traditionally associated with the Ottoman trade, and generally said to take their name from the same root as the title sultan -- were among the cheaper dried fruits reaching British kitchens, alongside currants and Valencia raisins. The rubbing-in method used here belongs to an older tradition than the creamed Victoria sandwich, and the absence of any raising agent, at a time when baking powder had been commercially available for decades, marks this as a deliberately plain recipe rather than a showpiece for the table.