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Washington Cake
Put three-quarters of a pound of fresh butter into a bowl, and beat it to cream. Add gradually a pound of sugar, four well-beaten eggs, a teacupful of milk, half a nutmeg, grated, half a tea-spoonful of powdered cinnamon, three table-spoonfuls of brandy, and a pound and three-quarters of flour; flour a pound of dried currants, and stir them in also (or they may be omitted). Beat the mixture briskly for a quarter of an hour. Dissolve a tea-spoonful of baking-powder in a little hot water, and stir it into the mixture. Line the sides and bottom of the pan with buttered paper, pour in the cake, and bake in a moderate oven. When a skewer which has been thrust into it comes out clear and dry it is done enough.
This is a pound-cake batter in the older sense — the lift comes almost entirely from creaming butter and sugar and from long beating, with a single teaspoon of baking powder as insurance. Treat the beating as the main technique, not a formality.
- Weights in metric and cups3/4 lb butter is 340 g (3 sticks); 1 lb sugar is 450 g (about 2 1/4 cups); 1 3/4 lb flour is 800 g (roughly 6 1/2 cups, spooned and levelled); 1 lb currants is 450 g. Weigh the flour if you can — a cup-measured error at this scale will make the cake dry.
- A teacupfulA Victorian teacup is smaller than a modern mug: reckon it at about 5 fl oz (150 ml). The batter should be stiff enough to hold the trace of the spoon, and a little extra milk is fair if it is unworkably dry.
- Half a nutmegGrated, that is about a rounded teaspoon of fresh nutmeg — assertive but correct for the style. Pre-ground nutmeg at the same volume will taste flat and slightly dusty.
- A moderate ovenThe original gives no temperature; 'moderate' is conventionally glossed as 350F (175C), but a cake this large and this rich bakes more evenly at 325F (160C). Expect 1 1/2 to 2 hours depending on the pan; tent the top with foil once it has coloured.
- The quarter-hour of beatingBy hand this was fifteen minutes of hard work; in a stand mixer with the paddle, 5 to 8 minutes after the eggs are in achieves the same aeration. Add the eggs one at a time so the butter does not split, and fold the flour in by hand at the end rather than beating it.
- Baking powder in hot waterDissolving chemical leaveners in liquid was a common nineteenth-century instruction, though the reasoning behind it is not recorded here. Modern baking powder can simply be sifted with the flour; dissolved in water it begins reacting before it reaches the batter and some of the gas is lost.
- Flouring the currantsTossing the fruit in a spoonful of the measured flour keeps it suspended rather than sinking to the base. Do it with flour taken from the 1 3/4 lb, not in addition to it.
- Pan and liningButtered paper means parchment now. This is a large cake — roughly 5 1/4 lb of batter — so use a deep 10-inch round tin, or divide it between loaf tins and reduce the baking time to about an hour.
- Testing and keepingThe skewer test still holds; a few moist crumbs are fine, wet batter is not. Cool completely in the tin, and note that this keeps well wrapped for a week and slices better on the second day.
Cakes named for Washington multiplied through the nineteenth century — Washington cake, Washington pie, Martha Washington cake — and the names generally attach to no documented family receipt but to the patriotic naming habit of American cookbooks, a habit often traced to the early decades of the century. What is notable here is that the recipe turns up in an English work, brandy, nutmeg, currants and all. Structurally it is a rich currant pound cake of the pre-chemical-leavening type, where the ratio of butter and sugar to flour does the work; the lone teaspoon of baking powder may well be a late addition to an older formula, which would explain why it sits awkwardly at the end of the method rather than with the flour where a modern recipe would put it.