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An Historical Cake
An historical recipe for a great cake "wrote by Nellie Custis for her grandmama." "Take forty eggs and divide the whites from the yolks and beat them to a froth. Then work four pounds of butter to a cream and put the whites of eggs to it, a spoonful at a time, till it is well worked. Then put four pounds of sugar finely powdered into it, in the same manner, then put in the yolks of eggs and five pounds of flour and five pounds of fruit. Two hours will bake it. Add to it one-half an ounce of mace, one nutmeg, one-half pint of wine and some fresh brandy." - Mrs Charles Custis Harrison, Philadelphia.
A Great Cake in the eighteenth-century manner: no chemical leavening, no liquid but wine and brandy, and a batter raised entirely by beaten egg and long working of the butter. Everything below follows from that.
- Scale it downAs written this is roughly thirty pounds of batter and will not fit in a domestic oven or mixer. An eighth of the recipe — 5 eggs, 1/2 lb butter, 1/2 lb sugar, 10 oz flour, 10 oz dried fruit, a good pinch of mace, a grating of nutmeg, 2 tablespoons wine and a splash of brandy — gives one 8-inch cake and behaves the same way.
- The hinge is the aerationThere is no baking powder or soda here. All the lift comes from the beaten whites folded into creamed butter and from the long incremental addition of sugar. Add the whites and then the sugar a spoonful at a time as directed, and fold the flour in by hand at the end; dump either in at once and you get a dense brick.
- No temperature is given"Two hours will bake it" points to a wood-fired oven falling from bread heat. For a scaled-down cake of this composition, a slow oven — 300F, dropping to 275F for a large deep tin — is a reasonable equivalent, and the time will be well under two hours. Test with a skewer rather than the clock.
- "Fruit" means dried fruitIn this period fruit in a great cake meant currants, raisins and citron, commonly washed and dried before going in. Equal weights of fruit and flour is very heavy by modern standards; toss the fruit in a spoonful of the measured flour to keep it from sinking.
- Mace and nutmegHalf an ounce of mace is roughly three tablespoons of ground blade mace — potent, and a dominant flavour of the cake alongside the wine. Buy whole blades and grind them if possible; pre-ground mace fades quickly.
- The wineHalf a pint here is eight fluid ounces, one cup, and it was likely Madeira or sherry rather than table wine. Apart from the eggs this is the only liquid in the recipe, so it is structural as well as flavouring — do not omit it without replacing the volume.
- Butter and sugar as they wereEighteenth-century butter was salted for keeping and often washed before use; unsalted butter with a scant pinch of salt added is closer. "Finely powdered" sugar means loaf sugar pounded and sieved, which is granulated sugar today, not confectioners'.
- KeepingA cake this rich in fruit and spirits was meant to be aged. Wrapped and fed with a little more brandy, it improves for weeks and was often baked well ahead of the day it was served.
Great Cake was the celebration cake of the Anglo-American gentry household — Twelfth Night, weddings, Christmas — and it is defined by scale as much as by ingredients: the quantity of eggs and fruit signalled both wealth and a kitchen with enough hands to beat forty eggs to a froth by arm. Versions of it circulate in Martha Washington's household papers and in manuscript receipt books across Virginia and Maryland, copied out from one woman to another, which is exactly what this page records: Eleanor Parke Custis, raised at Mount Vernon, writing a receipt out for her grandmother. That the cake reached a Philadelphia contributor and was printed as "an historical cake" says something about the period's appetite for Washington relics — the recipe is offered less as instruction than as an object to be admired, since few readers by then had an oven or a household that could accommodate it. The labor it took for granted, in a plantation kitchen, was mostly enslaved labor.