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Cheap Plum Cake
½ pound Five Roses flour ¼ pound currants ¼ pound mixed raisins 1 ounce candied peel 6 ounces brown sugar 6 ounces butter 2 eggs ½ teaspoon allspice ½ teaspoon baking powder ¼ teaspoon carbonate of soda.
Rub butter and flour together, and add other ingredients. Mix lightly with warm milk. Bake in a slow oven 1½ hours.
A plain rubbed-in fruit cake with weights rather than cups, and one deliberately vague liquid measure. Work by weight if you can; the ratios are the point.
- The weights in cups½ lb flour is about 1¾ cups, 6 oz butter is 1½ sticks, and 6 oz brown sugar is about ¾ cup lightly packed. The fruit comes to roughly ¾ cup currants and ¾ cup raisins.
- "Warm milk" is the ambiguityNo quantity is given, and the amount decides the cake. Expect somewhere between ⅓ and ½ cup, added a little at a time until the mixture drops heavily from the spoon rather than pours. Warm rather than cold milk is the usual advice with a rubbed-in mixture, on the grounds that cold liquid firms the butter in the crumb.
- Slow oven300 to 325F. At 350F the outside sets and colours long before the centre of a dense fruit batter is cooked, and the full 1½ hours would leave it dry at the edge.
- Carbonate of sodaOrdinary baking soda. With the baking powder it gives a small extra lift; the only acid to react with it is the molasses in the brown sugar, so its contribution here is modest.
- Candied peelOne ounce is a scant 3 tablespoons chopped. Period peel came in whole candied halves of citron, lemon or orange and was cut at home; supermarket mixed peel is already diced and usually sweeter, so no more than the stated ounce.
- Rubbing, not creamingButter is rubbed into the flour to a coarse crumb before anything else joins it. This produces a close, short, slightly crumbly cake rather than a light one, which is what a cheap plum cake was meant to be.
- Tin and donenessA 7-inch round or a 8x4-inch loaf tin, greased and lined, filled about two-thirds. A skewer should come out clean and the cake should have pulled slightly from the sides; if the top colours early, cover loosely with paper.
- YieldAbout 1¾ lb of cake, ten to twelve slices. It improves after a day wrapped, and keeps a week.
"Plum" in British and Canadian baking means dried fruit generally, a usage that survives from a time when plum covered raisins and currants as much as fresh fruit; there are no plums in a plum pudding either. The "cheap" in the title is a comparison with the rich plum cakes of the same era, which were by tradition far more lavish affairs for christenings and weddings. This version keeps the spiced dried fruit and drops nearly everything expensive, using two eggs, milk and chemical leavening to hold together a cake that a household could afford on an ordinary week. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour to Canadian home bakers.