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Sultana Cake
¼ pound butter 2 eggs ¼ pound sugar ¼ pound sultanas 2 ounces peel 2 cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon baking powder.
Cream butter and sugar. Add separately and unbeaten. Beat well. Then add flour and other ingredients. Bake 1 hour.
A plain, small pound-cake-style loaf given in the shorthand a 1913 cook expected to fill in herself. The weights matter more than the wording.
- The weights in cupsA quarter pound of butter is one stick (113 g); a quarter pound of sugar is a generous ½ cup; a quarter pound of sultanas is about ¾ cup. The 2 ounces of peel is candied citrus peel, roughly ⅓ cup chopped.
- "Add separately and unbeaten"This means the two eggs go in one at a time, straight from the shell, beaten into the creamed butter and sugar rather than whisked first. Let each one emulsify fully before the next or the batter will curdle.
- No oven temperature is givenAnd the recipe gives no indication of what was intended. For a loaf of this size and richness, a moderate modern oven — 325 to 350°F — is a reasonable choice; about an hour at 350°F in a greased 8x4-inch loaf pan, testing with a skewer at 45 minutes.
- Five Roses flourA household flour milled from hard Canadian spring wheat, generally stronger than the blended all-purpose flours common in the United States. Modern all-purpose works, but mix only until the flour disappears; overworking a high-protein flour toughens the crumb.
- The batter is meant to be stiffThere is no milk or water in the list, and none is missing. Expect something closer to a thick paste than a pourable batter — spread it into the pan and level the top.
- Fruit and peelSultanas are golden raisins; ordinary raisins substitute directly. Toss the fruit and peel with a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in so it stays suspended rather than sinking.
- YieldOne small loaf, about eight to ten slices. It keeps well wrapped for several days and improves on the second day.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal as advertising for its Five Roses brand flour, and its recipes were largely gathered from Canadian housewives who used it — which is why the instructions are so clipped, written by cooks for cooks who already knew what a creamed butter cake looked like. Sultanas, whose name is generally traced to the Turkish sultana, are the pale seedless grape long grown around Smyrna in Asia Minor, and by the early twentieth century they were reaching North American kitchens dried and boxed. The candied peel is the older, more festive element: preserved citrus rind was one way a northern household got citrus flavour into a cake before reliable winter shipping of fresh fruit.