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Longmeadow Loaf Cake
Cream five cups sugar, one and one-half cups butter, one cup lard. Mix thoroughly, divide and to the smaller part. of this mixture add four cups of warm milk, one cup of distillery yeast and flour enough to make batter which will be hard to stir with a spoon. Let it rise over night in a warm place. In the morning add the rest of the sugar and shortening, the whites of four eggs, one-third cup of brandy, one teaspoon of nutmeg and one teaspoon of saleratus.
Allow it to rise again until light, it may take four hours, then add one and one-half pounds of raisins and one-half pound of citron. Put in six round tins, and raise until light. Bake slowly one hour.
This is a yeast-raised loaf cake of the old New England kind — closer to a rich sweet bread than to a modern butter cake — and it is built on an overnight sponge. Read it as a two-day project and scale it down unless you actually want six loaves.
- Distillery yeastThis means liquid barm, skimmed from a distillery or brewery mash and carried home wet; nineteenth-century recipes measure it by the cupful because that is how it came. No reliable conversion to modern active dry yeast exists, since barm strength varied with whatever tub it came from.
- SaleratusPotassium (later sodium) bicarbonate — baking soda. A teaspoon here is not for lift so much as to sweeten the sponge, neutralizing the acidity that develops overnight and during the long second rise.
- "Bake slowly"No temperature is given; a slow oven is conventionally read today as somewhere around 300-325F. The recipe says one hour, but loaves this rich may need longer, so test with a skewer rather than the clock, and tent the tops if they color before the centers set.
- Flour is unmeasuredThe only guide is "enough to make batter which will be hard to stir with a spoon." Add it to the sponge gradually until the mass pulls heavily against the spoon and just holds a ridge — stiffer than a quick-bread batter, slacker than a kneadable dough.
- YieldFive cups of sugar, two and a half cups of fat and two pounds of fruit fills six round tins; the recipe gives no size for them. Expect a large batch and scale down if you want fewer; a quarter batch reduces the teaspoon measures to a scant quarter teaspoon each.
- The risesThree of them: overnight sponge, up to four hours after the sugar and shortening go in, then a final rise in the tins. The second is slow because the sugar and fat weigh the dough down; it is not misprinted. Keep the bowl somewhere reliably warm or it will stall.
- Fruit last, and flouredRaisins and citron go in only after the second rise. Tossing them in a little flour first helps them suspend rather than sink through a batter this loose.
- Brandy and nutmegA third cup of brandy across six loaves is there chiefly for flavor; do not count on it to keep the cakes. Grate the nutmeg fresh; a teaspoon of the pre-ground kind reads flat by comparison.
Loaf cake in this style — yeast-leavened, heavily sugared, studded with raisins and citron and scented with nutmeg and spirits — is often described as a Connecticut Valley specialty, though it was common across New England, and Longmeadow, Massachusetts, just south of Springfield, is exactly the sort of town that lent its name to a local version passed between households. Before chemical leavening became reliable and cheap, rich cakes were raised with barm begged from a brewer or distiller, which is why the recipe calls for a cup of it by volume rather than a weighed packet; the overnight sponge is a bread-baker's method applied to a cake. Once baking powder cakes had largely displaced the type, recipes like this one survived mostly as heirlooms — which also explains the vagueness about flour, since anyone who had made it before already knew what the batter should feel like.