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Pork Cake
1 pound pork (chopped fine), boil 2 minutes in half pint of water 1 cup molasses 2 cups sugar 3 eggs 2 teaspoons soda 1 pound raisins (chopped fine) 1 pound dates (chopped) Cinnamon Cloves Nutmeg Five Roses flour to make stiff batter.
This makes 3 loaves.
A fruitcake in which salt pork fat replaces butter. The original assumes you know what kind of pork and how much flour, so both need spelling out.
- What "pork" means hereNot fresh pork loin but fat salt pork — the hard white side fat sold as salt pork or fatback, with any lean streaks trimmed. It is the shortening for the cake; lean meat would leave gritty threads through the crumb. If your salt pork is heavily cured, rinse it before chopping, since the recipe adds no salt of its own.
- The two-minute boilThe point is to soften and partly render the fat so it disperses into the batter rather than to cook it through. Chop it as finely as you can manage first, then pour it with its half pint of water straight into the sugar and molasses while still hot and stir until the fat is broken down; the eggs go in only once the mixture is no longer hot enough to scramble them.
- UnitsA half pint is one cup by US measure; in a Canadian book of this period it may be the imperial half pint, about 1¼ cups. A pound of raisins is roughly 3 cups, a pound of pitted dates roughly 2½ cups; dates were commonly sold with the stones in, so buy pitted and skip that work.
- Flour, unmeasured"Stiff batter" is the only guide given. Expect somewhere between 5 and 6 cups of all-purpose flour for this quantity of liquid, sugar and fruit — add it a cup at a time until the batter holds the mark of the spoon and the fruit stays suspended rather than sinking.
- Soda and no other leaveningTwo teaspoons of baking soda is correct here because the molasses is acidic; the soda neutralises it and gives the dark colour and the faint bite this style of cake has. Do not substitute baking powder one for one.
- SpicesNone are quantified. For three loaves, about 2 teaspoons cinnamon, 1 teaspoon cloves and 1 teaspoon nutmeg is in period proportion; cloves dominate quickly, so err low.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no oven or timing at all. A slow oven, 300–325F, for about 1½ hours suits standard 9x5 loaf pans, with the pans lined. A hot oven sets the crust before the dense fruit centre cooks. A skewer should come out clean and the loaf should feel firm at the middle.
- KeepingThree loaves is a lot of cake, and that is the intention — the sugar, molasses and rendered fat make it keep for weeks wrapped in paper in a cool place, and like most fruitcakes it improves after a few days.
Pork cake belongs to a family of North American cakes built around whatever fat the household already had, and salt pork was a fat many farm kitchens kept year-round in the barrel. Where an English fruitcake called for a pound of butter, a Canadian or New England cook could get the same richness and keeping quality from side pork, boiling water poured over the chopped fat to soften it so it would blend with molasses and sugar. Recipes of this type circulate widely in late nineteenth and early twentieth century community and milling-company cookbooks under names like pork cake, salt pork cake and sometimes "poor man's fruit cake." Its appearance in a flour-company book such as this one is characteristic: the Five Roses collection was assembled largely from recipes sent in by home cooks across Canada.