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Five Eggs (Rub the butter and flour)
Rub the butter and flour together in a basin, then add the sultanas and all the other ingredients. Break the five eggs into another basin and whip them, then add them to the mixture.
Pour into a cake tin, and bake in a moderate oven for one and a half hour.
This is the method half of a rich fruit cake; the ingredient list that stood above it in the original book has not carried over, so quantities have to be inferred. Read it as a technique note rather than a complete formula.
- The missing ingredient listOnly the five eggs, butter, flour and sultanas are named. Any quantities given here would be invented, so treat this as a rubbing-in method to apply to a fruit cake recipe you already trust rather than a recipe to shop for.
- "Rub the butter and flour together"This is the rubbing-in method, not creaming: cold butter worked into the flour with the fingertips until it resembles coarse crumbs. It gives a shorter, closer crumb than a creamed batter and works only with butter that is cool and firm.
- A basinThe ordinary British term for a mixing bowl, often earthenware. Any bowl serves; the point of the second basin is simply that the eggs are beaten separately before they meet the dry mixture.
- Whipping the eggsFive whole eggs whipped to a pale foam are the only leavening mentioned, so beat them until they are thick and hold a ribbon, and fold rather than stir them in. If the recipe as printed in the book also called for baking powder, that changes the handling entirely.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F (175C), though the book gives no figure. For a cake sitting in the oven for an hour and a half, 325F (165C) is safer against a scorched crust, particularly with sultanas near the surface.
- Cake tinAn hour and a half at moderate heat suits a deep 7 to 8 inch round tin. Line the base and sides with parchment; the sugar and dried fruit in a cake of this type catch readily.
- TestingGo by a skewer coming out clean from the centre and by the cake shrinking slightly from the tin, not by the clock. Cool in the tin for ten minutes, then turn out.
Fruit cakes leavened chiefly by well-beaten eggs belong to the older British baking tradition, before chemical raising agents became standard in domestic kitchens; the whipped eggs do the lifting, and the rubbed-in butter keeps the crumb short. Sultanas — seedless dried white grapes, in this period largely imported from Turkey and Greece — were an alternative to the seeded muscatel raisin that had to be stoned by hand. That such a recipe survives here as bare method, its ingredient list detached, may simply reflect the way the book set its quantities out separately from the method.