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Coffee Fruit Cake
One cup of butter, two cups of brown sugar, four eggs, one-half cup of coffee, three cups of flour, one heaping teaspoon of baking powder, one cup of raisins chopped, one cup of currants, one teaspoon of lemon extract. Stir each egg separately with butter and sugar, add the coffee, and then stir in the flour by degrees; lastly add the fruit and extract.
— Mrs. A. J. Vedder
A butter-and-brown-sugar fruit loaf leavened with baking powder rather than yeast, with strong coffee standing in for the usual milk. The method is a straightforward creaming job; the only vagueness is the pan and the oven.
- The coffeeUse strongly brewed coffee, cooled to room temperature, not hot and not instant granules dissolved in water. Half a cup is enough to loosen the batter without thinning it; hot liquid will melt the creamed butter and break the emulsion.
- "Stir each egg separately"This is the hinge. Cream the butter and sugar first, then beat in the eggs one at a time, letting each disappear fully before the next goes in. Adding four eggs at once into a cup of butter will curdle the mixture and give a coarse, greasy crumb.
- Flour and measuringThree cups of unsifted modern all-purpose flour is roughly 13 oz / 375 g. Many period receipts assumed flour sifted before measuring, which would give closer to 12 oz; if the batter seems stiff, hold back the last few tablespoons.
- Baking powderA heaping teaspoon is roughly one and a half level teaspoons. Use a level 1 1/2 teaspoons of modern baking powder and no more.
- Dredge the fruitToss the chopped raisins and currants in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in, and fold only until distributed. Otherwise they sink to the bottom of a batter this loose.
- Lemon extractA teaspoon of extract is assertive by current taste. Half a teaspoon, or the grated zest of one lemon, reads cleaner against the coffee and brown sugar.
- Pan and ovenThe recipe gives neither. The batter is large for a single 9x5-inch loaf pan; divide it between two loaf pans, or use a tube pan, greased and lined. Bake at 325-350F until a skewer comes out clean, checking from about 55 minutes; a fruit-heavy loaf browns before its centre sets, so tent with foil if the top darkens early.
- Yield and keepingTwo loaves, or one large tube cake. Like most fruit cakes it improves on the second day; wrap it well once cold and the crumb stays moist for close to a week.
Coffee turns up in nineteenth-century American cake books as a working liquid, not just a flavour: it deepened the colour of brown-sugar and molasses cakes, and leftovers from the breakfast pot cost nothing extra. Cakes of this type sit between the older boiled or steamed fruit puddings and the lighter cakes that chemical leavening made possible -- baking powder, commercially available in the United States from the 1860s onward, let a cook produce a raisin-and-currant loaf without waiting on a yeast sponge. Raisins and currants kept well on the shelf year-round, which is one reason they recur in receipts of this kind. The attribution to Mrs. A. J. Vedder is typical of church and community cookbooks, where each contribution carried its contributor's name.