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Black Cake (See Also Fruit Cake)
1 pound powdered white sugar ¾ pound butter 1 pound sifted Five Roses flour 12 eggs (whites and yolks beaten separately) 2 pounds seeded raisins (part of them chopped) 2 pounds currants (carefully cleaned) ½ pound citron (cut in thin strips) ¼ ounce each of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg mixed 1 wineglass wine 1 wineglass brandy Rub butter and sugar together, add the beaten yolks of eggs, part of the flour, then the spice and the white of eggs well beaten. Add remainder of the flour, wine and brandy. Mix all together thoroughly.
Cover bottom and sides of a four-quart milk pan with buttered white paper. Put in a layer of the mixture, then a layer of the fruit, which has been previously dredged with flour, alternating and using batter for last layer. A small cup of New Orleans molasses makes the cake blacker and moister, but for this it is not necessary to add more flour. Bake 3 to 4 hours in a slow oven. This is excellent, and will keep for a long time. This black cake I have used for many years and find it most satisfactory for its keeping qualities, as it will improve with age if kept in air-tight tins.
A full-scale Victorian-style fruit cake: roughly eight pounds of batter and fruit, built in layers rather than stirred together. The critical points are the very low oven and the paper lining.
- Slow ovenConventionally somewhere around 275-300F. Much hotter and the outside sets and browns long before the dense centre is cooked; three to four hours at the low end is the intent. Test with a skewer, which should come out clean.
- Powdered white sugarIn this period "powdered" sugar means finely granulated, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Ordinary granulated or caster sugar is what you want.
- WineglassTake a wineglass as 2 fluid ounces (¼ cup), so 2 oz wine and 2 oz brandy. Period wineglasses varied, and a little more brandy will not hurt a cake of this size.
- The spiceA quarter ounce each of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg is roughly 1 tablespoon of each, ground, for the whole batch. Ground cloves at that level are assertive; taste your own if it has been open a while.
- The panA four-quart milk pan is a wide, fairly shallow basin. Any 4-quart vessel works, but shallower is better for even heat. Line base and sides with buttered parchment rather than buttered writing paper, and wrap the outside in a collar of paper or foil to insulate.
- Layering and dredgingThe fruit is tossed in flour and layered with the batter instead of folded in, which keeps two pounds of raisins and two of currants from sinking. Finish with batter so no fruit sits exposed on top, where it will scorch over four hours.
- New Orleans molassesDark unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap. The cup is optional and, as the recipe says, needs no extra flour to compensate.
- Yield and keepingAbout eight pounds of cake, enough for 40 or more thin slices. Cool completely, wrap, and store in an airtight tin; brushing the surface with brandy every few weeks is the traditional way to hold it for months.
Black cake is the dark, spirit-soaked end of the British fruit cake family, and the name simply describes the colour that molasses, long baking and a heavy load of currants and raisins produce. The type travelled with British settlement, and it belongs to the same family as the Christmas and wedding cakes of Canadian and English households and, by way of the sugar colonies, as Caribbean black cake, where the fruit is soaked in rum and port for months rather than dosed with a wineglass at mixing. Its presence in a flour-milling company's cookbook is practical advertising: a recipe calling for a pound of sifted flour, twelve eggs and four pounds of fruit made a showpiece of the flour, and the closing note about keeping qualities reflects an era when a cake was baked well ahead of the occasion and stored in tins to improve.