Home › Cake › White Fruit Cake
White Fruit Cake
1 cup butter 2 cups sugar 3 cups Gold Medal flour 1 teaspoon salt 8 egg whites 3/4 cup dessicated cocoanut This makes two brick loaves. 3 level teaspoons baking powder 1/2 glass white wine 1/4 pound citron 1/2 pound almonds 1 cup light Sultana raisins
This is an ingredient list with a yield attached rather than a method — typical of promotional flour pamphlets, which assumed the reader already knew how to build a pound-cake batter. The proportions are sound; what follows fills in the gaps.
- The assumed methodThis is a creamed butter cake with beaten whites folded in last: cream butter and sugar, alternate the sifted flour, salt and baking powder with the wine, add the fruit and nuts, then fold in the stiffly beaten whites. Folding rather than stirring at the end matters — the whites work with the baking powder to lighten three cups of flour and close to a pound of fruit.
- "1/2 glass white wine"Genuinely imprecise. A wine glass in period American cookbooks is often reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, which would make half a glass roughly 2 tablespoons; some sources use "glass" more loosely for a larger measure. Start at the small end and add only enough more to bring the batter to a thick dropping consistency.
- "Brick loaves"A brick loaf is baked in a straight-sided rectangular tin; sizes varied. Two standard 8-1/2 x 4-1/2 inch loaf pans, lined with parchment, take this batter comfortably.
- Oven and timeA rich white fruit cake wants a slow to moderate oven — 325F. Expect 1 to 1-1/4 hours for loaves this size; tent with foil once the top has coloured, since the fruit and coconut scorch well before the centre sets.
- Dessicated cocoanutUnsweetened dried shredded coconut, not the sweetened flaked kind sold today. If you substitute sweetened coconut, cut the sugar by about 1/4 cup.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks or diced tubs around the winter holidays. It is firmer and less sweet than candied orange; chop it small and toss it, with the raisins, in a spoonful of the measured flour so it does not sink.
- AlmondsThe recipe does not specify, but a white cake calls for blanched almonds — dropped in boiling water, skins slipped off, then sliced or chopped. Skins left on will streak a cake whose whole point is its pallor.
- Egg whitesEight whites is roughly one cup. Save the yolks; dark fruit cakes calling for yolks often appear alongside white ones in books of this kind.
- KeepingWrapped well, these loaves improve for several days and keep a couple of weeks. Unlike a dark fruit cake they are not heavily preserved by spirit and sugar, so refrigerate for longer storage.
White fruit cake — sometimes called bride's cake — was the pale counterpart to the dark, molasses-and-spice Christmas cake, and it is often said that the two were made on the same day from the same dozen eggs, whites to one bowl and yolks to the other. Its whiteness was the point: blanched almonds, light Sultanas rather than currants, citron rather than dark peel, no spice and no molasses, all of it lifted by beaten whites. That pallor carried real social weight in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when white cake signalled refinement and a well-stocked pantry, and it was a common choice for weddings in America. The recipe's appearance in a Gold Medal Flour book is straightforward commerce: Washburn-Crosby of Minneapolis distributed these collections to put its brand name inside the ingredient list of dishes home cooks already made, which is why the flour is specified by name and the wine is not.