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Wedding Cake II
1 lb. butter 1 lb. brown sugar 12 eggs 1 cup molasses 1 lb. flour 4 teaspoons cinnamon 4 teaspoons allspice 1 1/2 teaspoons mace 1 nutmeg, grated 1/4 teaspoons soda 3 lbs. raisins, seeded and cut in pieces 2 lbs. Sultana raisins 1 1/2 lbs. citron, thinly sliced and cut in strips 1 lb. currants 1/2 preserved lemon rind 1/2 preserved orange rind 1 cup brandy 4 squares chocolate, melted 1 tablespoon hot water Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and beat thoroughly. Separate yolks from whites of eggs, and beat yolks until thick and lemon-colored. Add to first mixture, then add flour (excepting one-third cup, which should be reserved to dredge fruit), mixed and sifted with spices, fruit dredged with flour, lemon rind and orange rind finely chopped, brandy. Chocolate, and whites of eggs beaten until stiff and dry. Just before putting into pans, add soda dissolved in hot water. Cover pans with buttered paper, and steam four hours. Finish cooking by leaving in a warm oven over night.
A black fruitcake of the old wedding-cake type: nearly eight pounds of dried fruit bound with barely a pound of flour, steamed rather than baked. Read the whole method before you start, because the batter has to be in the pans before the soda goes in.
- Scale and yieldThe ingredients add up to roughly 13 pounds of batter, enough for several large cakes; the recipe itself specifies neither the number nor the size of pans. Halving or quartering the quantities is straightforward; it was written for a household making a cake to be cut at a wedding and kept for months afterward.
- Chocolate squaresA square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so four squares is 4 oz. Melt over hot water, not direct heat, and let it cool slightly so it does not seize when it meets the cold batter.
- Preserved lemon and orange rindThis means candied peel, the same thing sold today in strips or diced, not North African salt-preserved lemons. The quantity is written as "1/2" with no unit; read it as the peel of half a lemon and half an orange, and if you are using bought diced peel, about 1/4 cup of each is in keeping.
- The sodaA quarter teaspoon in this volume of batter is a token amount, there to soften the acidity of the molasses rather than to raise the cake. The twelve eggs do the lifting. Dissolve it in the tablespoon of hot water and fold it in at the last moment, as directed, or it will spend its gas in the bowl.
- Dredging the fruitReserving a third of a cup of flour to toss with the raisins, currants and citron is not decorative. Coated fruit stays suspended instead of sinking to the bottom during four hours of steaming.
- SteamingSet the covered pans on a rack in a large pot with two inches of simmering water, lid on, and top up with boiling water as it evaporates. The buttered paper keeps condensation off the surface. Steam for the full four hours; the cake sets but stays pale and damp at this stage.
- The "warm oven over night"On a wood range this meant residual heat falling from perhaps 250F toward nothing. In a modern oven, 200F for two to three hours dries and firms the surface adequately; an unattended oven left on overnight is neither necessary nor advisable. The cake is cooked through by the steaming.
- KeepingCool completely, then wrap in brandy-dampened cloth and store airtight in a cool place. Cakes of this composition were routinely made a month or more ahead and improved for it.
Wedding cakes of this kind descend from the English plum cake tradition, in which the ratio of fruit to flour rose over the nineteenth century until the flour was little more than mortar. Steaming was one way of handling so dense a mixture, though slow baking was at least as common: wet heat cannot exceed the boiling point, so the outside cannot scorch during the hours the middle needs, and the finish in a cooling oven simply dried the crust. The molasses and unsweetened chocolate here darken the crumb to near-black; American books of the period commonly paired a dark fruit cake with a white almond or silver cake, the white one usually being the bride's cake and the dark the groom's.