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English Plum Cake
One pound of flour; four ounces each of drippings or butter, Sultana raisins and currants; six ounces sugar; two ounces candied peel of orange or lemon; two eggs; two teaspoons baking-powder; grated rind one lemon and a scant half pint of milk. Take an extra ounce of sugar (use for this the lump or cube sugar) and burn it brown in a saucepan, then pour in on it the milk; stir till it is coloured well; strain and cool it. Rub the drippings into the flour, I2I add sugar and the eggs well beaten, the Sultanas and candied peel, and milk. Bake nearly two hours.
A plain fruit cake of the economical English sort, given in shorthand that assumes a cook who already knows what she is doing. Two things in the ingredient list never reappear in the method, and the oven is left entirely to your judgement.
- The burnt sugar comes firstMelt the extra ounce of cube sugar in a dry pan until it is a dark amber and just smoking, then pour the milk in — it will hiss and seize, so keep stirring over low heat until the caramel dissolves. Strain and cool it completely before it meets the eggs, or you will scramble them. This is for colour and a faint bitterness, not sweetness.
- Ingredients the method forgetsThe currants and the baking powder are listed but never mentioned again — and neither is the grated lemon rind. Sift the baking powder with the flour, and add the currants along with the sultanas and peel.
- A scant half pintOn the imperial pint of 20 fluid ounces, half a pint is 10 — about 1¼ cups or 285 ml; if the book is American, with a 16-ounce pint, it would be 8 fluid ounces. "Scant" means a little under. Hold back a couple of tablespoons and add them only if the batter is stiffer than a dropping consistency.
- DrippingsSaved meat fat, beef dripping most commonly, the cheap everyday alternative to butter. It gives a savoury edge some modern palates dislike; butter is offered as the alternative and rubs in much the same way.
- Rubbing in, not creamingThe fat goes into the flour with the fingertips until it looks like coarse crumbs, then everything else is stirred in. This is a rubbed cake rather than a creamed one, so it will be closer in texture to a rock bun than to a modern butter cake — do not beat it hard once the milk is in.
- Oven and tinNo temperature is given. For a cake this size baking nearly two hours, use 300–325°F; the mixture comes to around 3 lb raw, so choose a lined tin with room for it. Anything hotter will set the crust long before the middle cooks. Cover the top loosely with foil if it darkens early, and test with a skewer from about 1 hour 40 minutes.
- Candied peelTwo ounces of whole candied orange or lemon peel, chopped yourself, is far better than the diced mixed peel sold in tubs. Toss it and the dried fruit in a spoonful of the measured flour so it does not sink.
- YieldNearer 2½ to 3 lb of cake. It keeps well wrapped for a week and improves after a day.
"Plum" in an English cake name has meant dried fruit — raisins, currants, sultanas — since long before it meant anything fresh, which is why a plum cake and a plum pudding contain no plums, and why the grape is never far away: sultanas and currants are both dried grapes, the sultana from a seedless pale variety associated with Turkey and Greece, the currant a small dark grape whose name descends from Corinth. The recipe belongs to the thrifty end of the tradition rather than the celebratory one; there is no brandy, no almonds, no long-keeping richness, and the fat may be the drippings saved from the roasting tin. The burnt-sugar milk is the giveaway of a household economising — a spoonful of caramel gave a cheap cake the dark, well-fruited look of an expensive one, a trick also sold commercially as "browning" and "parisian essence" through the same period.