Election Cake
4 lbs. or 12 4/5 cups Gold Medal flour 3 lbs. or 6 cups sugar 2 lbs. or 4 cups butter Whites of 6 eggs 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 4 nutmegs 1 qt. sweet milk 1 1/2 lbs. raisins 1/2 pint home-made yeast Juice and rind of 2 lemons Cream the butter and sugar, then divide; with one-half mix all the flour, milk and yeast; when light add the other half of butter and sugar, eggs, raisins and flavoring. Beat thoroughly; put in pans and let rise till light and bake with great care.
This is a yeast-raised cake in the eighteenth-century manner, closer to a rich sweet bread than to anything from a modern cake tin, and it is built on a scale meant for a household feeding a crowd. Two decisions govern the outcome: how you replace the home-made yeast, and how patiently you let it rise.
- Scale it downFour pounds of flour, three of sugar and two of butter, plus a quart of milk and 1 1/2 lb of raisins, makes something over 13 lb of dough — four large loaf pans at least, more likely five or six. Quartering the whole list is the sane way to try it.
- The yeast is the ambiguityHalf a pint of home-made yeast was a live, thin, unpredictable barm; there is no honest fixed conversion to modern dry yeast. For 4 lb of flour, something on the order of 2 to 3 packets (about 4-6 teaspoons) of active dry yeast is a reasonable starting point, but treat the first attempt as calibration and judge by the dough rather than the clock.
- NutmegOne whole nutmeg grates down to roughly 2-3 teaspoons, so four nutmegs is somewhere around 8-12 teaspoons in the full batch. That is assertive even by period standards; 2-3 teaspoons of freshly grated nutmeg in the full quantity suits most modern palates.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh whole milk, as opposed to the soured or buttermilk that these books also called for. Warm it to blood heat before mixing it into the sponge or the butter will seize and the yeast will sulk.
- The two-stage methodThe first half of the creamed butter and sugar, all the flour, milk and yeast make a very rich sponge that must be left until visibly light and domed — expect several hours in a warm kitchen, not one. Only then does the rest of the butter, sugar, eggs, raisins and lemon go in.
- Second rise, then "bake with great care"Fat and sugar this heavy slow the yeast badly, so the panned loaves may take two to three hours to rise. Bake at 325-350F; a large loaf will want 1 to 1 1/2 hours, and the top will need covering with foil well before the centre is set.
- Judge by temperatureWith this much butter and fruit, colour tells you very little. A skewer should come out clean and the crumb should read around 190-205F at the centre.
- KeepingLike most yeasted fruit cakes it is better on the second day, and it slices far more cleanly once fully cold. Wrapped well, it keeps a week.
Election cake is a New England institution, associated above all with Hartford, Connecticut, where it was baked for the crowds who came to town on election day — a public occasion of sorts, with the yeasted, fruited, spiced loaf handed round in quantity. A recipe under that name appears in Amelia Simmons's American Cookery (1796), the first cookbook written by an American, and it too was built on pounds of flour and home-brewed barm — the 'emptins' of the period — rather than any chemical leavening. By the time a milling company like Washburn-Crosby put it in a promotional book for its Gold Medal flour, the cake had largely outlived the civic occasion and survived as heirloom baking: proof that the flour could carry a heavy, rich, slow-rising dough. The enormous quantities are a fair reminder that these were once communal cakes, and that a household baking day meant heating an oven for four loaves rather than one.