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Washington Loaf Cake
3 cups light brown sugar 2 cups (scant) butter 1 cup sour milk Little nutmeg 1 teaspoon cinnamon 5 eggs 1 teaspoon soda 4 cups Five Roses flour 1 cup currants 2 cups raisins 1 cup almonds.
Mix as usual, stirring fruit in last, well dredged with flour.
A dense fruited loaf in the old creamed-butter style, with the method left almost entirely to the cook. The proportions are large: this is a two-loaf batter, not a single tin.
- "Mix as usual"The assumed method is creaming: beat the butter and brown sugar until light, add the eggs one at a time, then alternate the flour (with spices) and the sour milk, and fold in the floured fruit last. Nothing here is meant to be mixed all at once.
- Scant 2 cups butterAbout 425-450 g, a little under a full pound. "Scant" means filled just below the rim rather than levelled generously; the difference is perhaps two tablespoons and the cake tolerates it either way.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here would have been naturally clabbered milk, acidic enough to react with the teaspoon of soda. Modern pasteurised milk does not sour in the same way, so use buttermilk, or a cup of milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- Five Roses flourA hard-wheat Canadian all-purpose flour from the Lake of the Woods mills, stronger than most soft southern flours. Ordinary all-purpose is the right substitute; measure by dipping and levelling, roughly 480-500 g for the four cups.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. A batter this rich and this heavy with fruit is normally baked slow, around 300-325F; hotter and it will brown long before the centre sets.
- Pans and timeDivide between two 9x5-inch loaf tins, lined with paper. Expect 1 1/4 to 1 3/4 hours; test with a skewer in the centre, and tent with foil once the top has coloured.
- Dredging the fruitThe instruction to dredge the currants and raisins well with flour is the point of the line, not decoration. Take the flour from the measured four cups so the balance is unchanged, and the fruit will hang suspended instead of sinking to the base.
- Almonds and nutmegA cup measure suggests almonds in pieces, blanched and chopped or slivered, rather than ground. "Little nutmeg" is left to the cook -- a pinch, perhaps a quarter teaspoon, freshly grated; the spicing is meant to sit behind the brown sugar and fruit.
- KeepingTwo substantial loaves, twelve to sixteen slices each. Like most butter-and-fruit loaves it improves after a day or two wrapped closely, and it slices far more cleanly cold.
Loaf cake in nineteenth-century North American cookery meant a rich, yeast- or soda-raised fruited batter baked in a bread tin rather than a decorated layer cake, and "Washington" was one of a family of patriotic names attached to such cakes throughout the 1800s, alongside Election Cake, Lafayette Cake and Martha Washington Cake. The association with George Washington is honorific rather than documentary; there is no reliable link between these recipes and anything eaten at Mount Vernon. What the recipe really records is a household economy: brown sugar rather than refined loaf sugar, sour milk saved from the pantry, currants and raisins as the only imported luxury, and a pound of butter to carry it all. Its appearance in the Five Roses book, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company for Canadian home bakers, reflects both the milling company's interest in showing off a strong prairie-wheat flour and the compilers' habit of printing recipes contributed by customers in the shorthand a practised baker would already understand.