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Five Eggs (Beat the butter and sugar)
Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; add the flour, sifted by degrees, and the eggs, one at a time, beating all well together with your hand.
Now add the sultanas, the candied peel chopped up, and the grated rind of the lemon; mix all well together with a spoon. Line a cake-tin with buttered paper, putting three rounds of buttered paper at the bottom of the tin; pour in the cake and bake for two hours in a moderate oven.
When baked, turn it out on to a sieve to cool.
A rich fruit cake of the plain Victorian type, with the ingredient list reduced almost entirely to its title. The method is sound; the quantities need reconstruction.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the eggs are specified. Cakes of this kind in late-Victorian books are pound-cake proportions — equal weights of butter, sugar and flour, roughly 10 oz each against five eggs, with 8–12 oz sultanas and 2–3 oz candied peel. Any figure here is inference, not the author's.
- Beating with the handNot a quaint flourish. A warm hand emulsifies butter, sugar and egg faster than a cold spoon and lets the cook feel curdling as it starts. A stand mixer on medium does the same work; add the eggs one at a time and let each disappear before the next.
- Flour and eggs togetherThe sifted flour goes in by degrees alongside the eggs rather than all at the end. Adding flour with the eggs does help steady a batter against splitting when five are going in, though the author gives no reason. Follow the original and alternate.
- Moderate oven, two hoursA moderate oven is 350F, but two hours at 350F will overbake a cake of this size and scorch the fruit. For a deep, heavy fruit mixture, 325F is nearer the intent of the original, and a skewer to the centre matters more than the clock.
- Three rounds of paperThe layered paper at the base is insulation against the fierce bottom heat of a range oven. In a fan or conventional oven one lining is enough, though a double thickness at the base still protects a two-hour bake.
- Sultanas and peelSultanas were sold uncleaned and often stemmy; modern packets need no picking over. Dredge them in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in, or they sink. Buy whole candied citron or mixed peel in the piece and chop it yourself — ready-diced peel is drier and duller.
- Cooling on a sieveA sieve served as the Victorian cooling rack. Leave the cake in its tin for fifteen minutes first, then turn out and peel the papers away while still warm.
- YieldThe original names no tin size. On the reconstructed quantities, something in the region of a 7- to 8-inch round cake. It keeps a week wrapped, and improves after two or three days.
This belongs to the plainest and oldest branch of English cake baking: the creamed butter cake, in which air beaten into fat and sugar does the lifting and no chemical raising agent appears at all. Recipes titled simply by their egg count — "Five Eggs", "Six Eggs" — turn up in older cookery books, where a cook was expected to know that eggs anchored a set of pound-cake proportions and to scale butter, sugar and flour to match. Sultanas, seedless and imported dried from the eastern Mediterranean, had become cheap enough by then to be the everyday fruit of such a cake, with candied peel and lemon rind supplying what little perfume it has. The three rounds of buttered paper in the tin are the clearest sign of the period's equipment: a coal-fired range gave uneven, bottom-heavy heat, and paper was one of the insulations a cook could reach for.