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White Fruit Cake
1 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 cup milk 2½ cups Five Roses flour (more or less) 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 pound dates ¼ pound shelled almonds ¼ pound citron peel Juice and rind of 1 orange 2 tablespoons brandy Whites of 7 eggs 1 pound raisins Mix butter and sugar together. Add milk and flavoring. Dredge the fruit with flour, mix all together, and add the whites of the 7 eggs beaten stiff. Bake in a slow oven 2 hours.
A white fruit cake is a butter cake carried by egg whites alone, which is what keeps the crumb pale under two pounds of fruit. The order of operations in the original is compressed almost to the point of shorthand, so the notes below fill in what a 1915 cook would have taken for granted.
- Slow ovenA slow oven of the period is usually rendered as somewhere between 275F and 325F; 300F is a safe reading. A cake this dense with fruit will scorch at the edges long before the centre sets if the oven is hotter, and the recipe's two hours suits the lower end of that range in a deep pan.
- "More or less" flourThe parenthesis is honest: 2½ cups is a starting point, and the batter should be thick enough to suspend the fruit rather than let it sink. Add flour a few tablespoons at a time until a spoonful mounds instead of running. Note that Five Roses was a household flour milled from Canadian hard spring wheat, so likely somewhat stronger than a modern soft all-purpose.
- Egg whites go in lastSeven whites beaten stiff are the only lift besides the baking powder. Fold them in with a spatula after the floured fruit, in two or three additions, and stop while streaks are still faintly visible. Beating them into the batter collapses them and gives a heavy, damp cake.
- Why the fruit is dredgedTossing dates, raisins, peel and nuts in some of the measured flour coats the sticky surfaces so they stay suspended in the batter instead of settling into a solid layer at the bottom. Take the dredging flour from the 2½ cups, not in addition to it.
- Citron peelCandied citron, the thick-cut peel of a citrus grown almost entirely for its rind. It is no longer a supermarket staple; look in a baking supply shop or online, or substitute candied lemon peel, which is milder but behaves the same way.
- Almonds"Shelled" means only that the nuts are out of the shell, not that they are skinned. Blanch and skin them if yours have skins on, since the brown flecks show in a white cake. Chop coarsely so the cake slices cleanly.
- Pan and liningThe volume suits a 9-inch tube pan or two 8x4-inch loaf pans, greased and lined with parchment. Fruit cake batter sticks and the long bake dries the crust, so lining is not optional.
- Doneness and yieldA skewer in the centre should come out with no wet batter; expect the cake to shrink slightly from the sides. This is a large cake: the listed ingredients alone come to something near five pounds before baking loss.
- KeepingCool completely, wrap in parchment then foil, and give it a week in a tin before cutting. Only 2 tablespoons of brandy go into the batter, so this is not a heavily preserved cake; refrigerate it if you intend to keep it more than two or three weeks.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and distributed to promote its Five Roses brand flour, milled from Canadian hard spring wheat. Books of this kind were assembled largely from recipes sent in by customers, which accounts for the telegraphic style here and for the flour quantity being left frankly open. White fruit cake belongs to the same family as the darker Christmas and wedding cakes of the period, but it omits molasses, brown sugar and the whole eggs, keeping only the whites so that the crumb stays pale around the fruit; such cakes were often made for weddings and christenings, where a white cake was thought more suitable than a dark one.