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Yeast Cake, Excellent
Rub one pound of butter into six pounds of flour, and add a tea-spoonful of salt. Make a hole in the centre of the flour, without touching the bottom of the bowl, and pour into this a little more than half a pint of good, fresh, sweet yeast, mixed with half a pint of lukewarm water. Stir into the yeast as much flour from the sides as will make a batter, sprinkle flour over the surface, and leave the mixture for an hour, or till the yeast has risen in bubbles through the covering of flour. Stir into the yeast four well-beaten eggs, add one pound of fine raw sugar, and knead the whole thoroughly with about half a pint of hot milk. Let this dough stand to rise till it is very light and the surface has cracked. Knead it again with three pounds of currants picked and dried, and half a pound of candied lemon and orange mixed; add also a little grated nutmeg. Put the cake-mixture into two large tins, well buttered, let it rise before the fire for a quarter of an hour, and bake the cakes in a moderately-heated oven. Time to bake the cakes, three hours. Sufficient for two large cakes. Probable cost 2s. 10d. each cake.
This is a barm-risen fruit cake on a baker's scale — six pounds of flour and three pounds of currants make roughly 12 lb of dough. The two points that decide success are the yeast substitution and keeping the fruit out until the second knead.
- Scale it downAs written this fills two large hoops and will not fit a domestic mixer or most ovens. Quartering the recipe (1½ lb flour, 4 oz butter, 12 oz currants, 1 egg, 4 oz sugar) gives one 8-inch cake and behaves the same way.
- "Sweet yeast" is barm"Sweet yeast" here is most likely brewer's barm — a wet, active liquid leaven rather than compressed yeast. For the full quantity use about 2 oz fresh yeast, or the equivalent 5-6 teaspoons of instant dried yeast, slaked in the half pint of lukewarm water. "Sweet" in this period generally means unsoured; old barm turns bitter.
- The flour-well spongeMaking the hole "without touching the bottom of the bowl" keeps the yeast batter off the cold bottom of the bowl and surrounded by flour, which would have helped hold its warmth. Modern equivalent: a loose sponge left an hour until it bubbles up through the flour covering, as the recipe describes.
- Oven temperatureA "moderately-heated oven" is usually taken today as around 350F/175C, though the book gives no temperatures. For a cake of this size and sugar content three hours at that heat risks scorching the crust; 325F/160C with the tins double-lined in paper is safer.
- Fruit goes in lastCurrants and candied peel added before the first rise slow fermentation badly — the sugar and the cut fruit surfaces draw water out of the dough. Knead them in only after the surface has cracked, and work quickly so the dough is not degassed twice.
- Fine raw sugarThis means an unrefined light cane sugar, roughly today's golden caster or demerara ground finer. Plain caster sugar works; it simply loses a little of the molasses note.
- Currants "picked and dried"Nineteenth-century dried fruit arrived gritty with stalks and sand. Modern currants need only a rinse if at all, and should be dried thoroughly — wet fruit streaks the crumb.
- Judging it doneA skewer will not read reliably through this much fruit. Look for an internal temperature of 205-210F/96-99C and a loaf that sounds hollow when the tin is rapped.
- KeepingYeast-risen fruit cake stales faster than a creamed butter cake. It is at its best on the day and the day after, and is traditionally sliced and buttered once past that.
Before chemical raising agents took over the domestic cake, yeast did the work, and "yeast cake" of this kind is an older relative of what we now call fruit cake — close in spirit to a Twelfth-night dough, a Bath bun or the enriched fruited breads still baked across the north of England and the Channel Islands. The tell is the barm: half a pint of "good, fresh, sweet yeast" assumes a household with ready access to a brewer or yeast dealer, since barm was a by-product of beer and was generally bought in a jug rather than kept on a shelf. The costing — 2s. 10d. a cake, a sum comparable to a labourer's daily wage — suggests a celebration bake rather than everyday food, and the six-pound flour quantity suits a large household baking to fill a bread oven while it was hot.