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YORKSHIRE SPICE CAKE (sometimes called Yule Cake)
These cakes are made in large quantities in Yorkshire families at Christmas time. They are freely offered to strangers and presented to friends, and are frequently eaten with cheese instead of bread. Put eight pounds of flour into a bowl, and mix a table-spoonful of salt with it; then rub into it a pound and a half of butter, and two pounds of lard. Scoop a hole in the centre of the paste without touching the bottom, and pour in half a pint of fresh sweet brewer's yeast mixed with water. Stir flour into the yeast till it is like batter, sprinkle flour over the top, and set the bowl in a warm place. When the yeast rises in bubbles through the flour, knead the dough thoroughly as for common bread, and let it rise till it is light. When risen, work in with it six pounds of currants, picked and dried thoroughly, three pounds of raw sugar, some grated nutmeg, and eight well-beaten eggs. Divide it into loaves of various sizes, put these into tins which they will half fill, lined with buttered paper, and bake the cakes in a well-heated oven. The yeast must on no account be bitter. Time to bake the cakes, according to size. Probable cost, 10d. per pound.
This is a yeast-raised fruit bread rather than a creamed cake, built on the scale of a Victorian farmhouse Christmas. Everything about it needs scaling and translating before it will work in a domestic kitchen.
- Scale firstThe full quantity is over twenty pounds of dough, enough for six or eight loaves. An eighth of the recipe — 1 lb flour, 3 oz butter, 4 oz lard, 12 oz currants, 6 oz sugar, 1 egg — gives one substantial loaf and behaves the same way.
- Brewer's yeastHalf a pint of fresh brewer's barm is a wet, dilute leaven, far weaker by volume than modern yeast. For 8 lb of flour use about 2 oz fresh baker's yeast, or the equivalent in instant dried (roughly 6 teaspoons), slackened with warm water; at the one-eighth scale, a scant teaspoon of instant. The insistence that the yeast must not be bitter probably refers to hop residue carried over in brewery barm, and does not apply to modern yeast.
- The spongeStirring flour into the yeast in a well and leaving it to bubble through the surrounding flour is a sponge, and it is the step that matters here. The dough is heavy with fat and fruit, so a properly active sponge is the only thing that will lift it. Do not shortcut it.
- Fruit and sugar go in lastCurrants and sugar are worked in after the first rise, deliberately — sugar and dried fruit both slow fermentation. Keep to that order or the loaves will be dense.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, small black raisins, not fresh blackcurrants. "Picked" means stalks and grit removed; modern packaged fruit needs only a rinse and a thorough drying, since wet fruit will streak the crumb.
- Raw sugarUnrefined cane sugar of the period, coarse and slightly molasses-flavoured. Demerara or light muscovado is the closest thing on a supermarket shelf.
- OvenThe recipe says only 'a well-heated oven' and gives no time. For a large enriched fruit loaf, start around 350F and drop to 325F after twenty minutes, tenting with foil once the top has coloured, since the sugar and fruit catch. A 2 lb loaf will take roughly an hour and a quarter to an hour and a half; the centre should read about 200F.
- Tins and liningButtered paper is parchment now. Filling the tins only half full is correct — the dough roughly doubles and a full tin will spill.
- ServingThe note about eating it with cheese is not incidental. Cut it in slabs and serve with a crumbly Wensleydale or a sharp Cheshire; it keeps a week wrapped in cloth and toasts well thereafter.
Yorkshire spice cake, Yule cake or simply spice bread belongs to the northern English tradition of enriched Christmas breads raised with brewer's barm rather than by creamed butter and beaten eggs — closer kin to Lincolnshire plum bread than to a Victorian iced fruitcake. The pairing with cheese, which this recipe records as ordinary practice, is the detail that survives best: sweet spiced bread with a wedge of Wensleydale is still eaten at Christmas in Yorkshire, and is often said to have been offered to carol singers and callers at the door through the twelve days. Brewer's barm came from the local brewery in liquid form and had to be used while fresh, which is one reason such baking was done in a single large batch, much of it given away, as the recipe's own headnote describes. The costing at tenpence a pound is pre-decimal currency.