Peel Cake

A plain fruited butter cake of the type Canadian households baked by the tin rather than the slice. The recipe assumes you know what cake batter should look like, since it never tells you how much flour to use.

• "Flour to mix stiff"This is genuinely open-ended, and no honest conversion exists. A batter with this much sugar, butter and egg should drop heavily from the spoon rather than pour; in practice that is likely to be somewhere in the region of 2½ to 3 cups, added a little at a time until it stops slackening — but that is an estimate, not a rule. Add too much and the cake bakes dry and crumbly.
• Slow oven300–325°F. A heavy fruited batter needs the low heat so the centre sets before the sugar and raisins on the outside scorch. Expect roughly an hour to an hour and a quarter in a loaf or tube pan, tested with a skewer.
• Sour milkNot spoiled milk but deliberately soured — buttermilk is the direct substitute. Half a cup of whole milk with 1½ teaspoons of lemon juice or vinegar, left ten minutes, does the same job of giving the soda something to react with.
• SodaA teaspoon of baking soda, not baking powder; the two are not interchangeable here. Dissolve it in the sour milk immediately before mixing and get the batter into the oven promptly, since much of the lift is lost if the batter is left to stand.
• PeelCandied orange or lemon peel, the sort sold in strips or diced for fruitcake. Half a cup by volume, chopped fine. Supermarket mixed peel works; the strips have better flavour if you can find them.
• NutmegNo quantity is given, in the usual manner of a book that expected a whole nutmeg and a grater on the shelf. A quarter to half a teaspoon freshly grated suits this amount of batter.
• SaltNone is listed; butter of the period was frequently salted. If you use unsalted butter, add half a teaspoon with the flour.
• Chopped raisinsChopping matters — two cups of whole raisins sink and clump, while chopped fruit suspends through the crumb. Tossing them in a spoonful of the measured flour helps further.
• YieldThis makes a large quantity of batter; two cups of raisins plus the flour needed to stiffen it will likely be more than a single 9x5-inch loaf pan can take, so be ready to divide it between two pans or use a large tube pan. It keeps well wrapped for several days and improves on the second day.