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Scriptural Cake
4½ cups Five Roses flour, 1 Kings iv, 22 1 cup butter, Judges v, 25 2 cups sugar, Jeremiah vi, 20 2 cups raisins, 1 Samuel xxx, 12 2 cups figs, Nathaniel iii, 12 2 cups almonds, Numbers xvii, 8 ½ 1/2 cup sour milk, Judges iv, 19 3 tablespoons honey, 1 Samuel xiv, 25 Pinch of salt, Leviticus ii, 13 6 eggs, Jeremiah xvii, 11 2 teaspoons soda, Amos iv, 5 Season with spices to taste, 2 Chronicles ix, 9.
Follow Solomon's prescription for making a good boy (Proverbs iii, 12) and you will have a good cake. Bake in slow oven.
A fruit cake written as a Bible quiz: each ingredient is keyed to a verse, and the method is hidden in Proverbs iii, 12 — "whom the Lord loveth he correcteth" — meaning beat the batter well. Everything you need to actually bake it has to be reconstructed.
- The hidden methodCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, add honey, then the fruit and nuts tossed in a little of the flour, then alternate flour and sour milk with the soda dissolved in it. The scriptural joke supplies no mixing order, but this is the standard creamed-cake sequence for the period.
- Slow oven300F. A cake this size and this heavy with fruit needs 2½ to 3 hours; tent the top with foil once it colours, and test with a skewer at the centre.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured, i.e. cultured. Buttermilk is the direct substitute; ½ cup of whole milk with 1½ teaspoons of lemon juice or vinegar, left ten minutes, does the same job.
- The soda is highTwo teaspoons of soda against only ½ cup of sour milk is more alkali than the acid can neutralise, and the surplus tastes soapy and darkens the crumb. Honey and dried fruit contribute a little acidity, but one teaspoon is closer to modern practice for this quantity of batter.
- Figs and almondsDried figs, stemmed and chopped, not fresh. The almonds should be blanched and coarsely chopped or slivered; whole ones make the cake impossible to slice cleanly.
- Nathaniel iii, 12There is no book of Nathaniel. The fig verse is Nahum iii, 12; "Nathaniel" is a misprint.
- The stray lineThe "½ cup butter, 1½ cups sugar" at the end appears to be a stray fragment rather than part of this cake. Ignore it.
- Pan and yieldThere are about six cups of fruit and nuts in it. Bake in a large tube pan or two lined loaf tins, well greased and papered. It gives 20 to 24 generous slices and keeps, wrapped, for several weeks.
Scripture cake, also called Bible cake, circulated in North American and British community cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward and turns up in church fundraising collections well into the twentieth. It is a puzzle as much as a formula: the cook is expected to look up each citation to learn what the ingredient is, which made it a Sunday-school exercise and a parlour amusement as well as supper. The underlying cake is an ordinary rich fruit cake of the kind every household baked for Christmas and weddings, dressed in scriptural clothing. Five Roses, milled by Lake of the Woods Milling Company, is said to have circulated its cook book in connection with its flour, and the recipes were solicited from Canadian housewives, though the distribution terms varied and the contributed recipes were editorially handled. Read next Cake Making and Baking Test for Eggs English Christmas Cake Hickory Nut Cake Caramel Sauce ← Rye Meal Cake Shingles → About Historical Disclaimer Ter