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Five Eggs (Half a pound of Sultanas)
Half a pound of Sultanas.
One gill of Milk.
The rind of one Lemon.
One teaspoonful of Baking-powder.
Four ounces of Peel.
Salt. Cream the butter and sugar well together, sift in the flour, the salt, and the baking-powder; add the eggs, one at a time, and the milk; beat all well together with your hand; then stir in the sultanas, the peel chopped, and the grated lemon-rind. Mix well. Line a cake-tin with buttered paper, two thicknesses at the bottom, and bake in a moderate oven for one hour and a half.
A plain rich fruit cake in the pound-cake tradition, printed here with only the second half of its ingredient list. Read the notes on the missing quantities before you start.
- The list is incompleteThe method calls for butter, sugar, flour and eggs, but only the sultanas, milk, lemon, baking powder, peel and salt are given quantities. The title supplies the number of eggs; the rest has to be guessed at. If you follow the pound-cake proportions of roughly equal weights of butter, sugar and flour against the weight of the eggs, five eggs come to something like 10 oz each, with a good pinch of salt — but this is a reconstruction, not the book's own figure.
- A gillThis is a British book, so a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz or a scant 2/3 cup. In an American book it would be 4 fl oz.
- Peel"Peel" means candied citrus peel, which was commonly sold in large pieces or halves of orange and lemon that had to be chopped, as the recipe's own "the peel chopped" implies. Four ounces of ready-diced mixed peel does the same job; whole candied peel has better flavour if you can find it.
- Moderate oven350F/175C. For a rich fruited cake baked an hour and a half, 325F/165C is the safer setting — the sugar in the fruit catches long before the centre is set.
- The double paperTwo thicknesses of buttered paper at the base is not fussiness; it insulates the bottom of the cake from a fierce oven floor. Keep it. A single layer of parchment on the base plus a collar up the sides, or a band of paper tied round the outside of the tin, achieves the same thing.
- Tin and yieldOn the reconstructed quantities the batter should suit a 7-inch round or 6-inch square deep tin and give roughly 12 to 16 slices. In anything much wider the cake will be shallow and may dry before the time is up.
- Beating with the handThe instruction is literal: the hand was used as the beater. A stand mixer on low does the job; stop as soon as the flour disappears, then fold the fruit in by hand so it does not break up.
- TestingAn hour and a half is a starting point, not a guarantee. A skewer into the centre should come out clean with no wet crumb; if the top is browning too fast at the hour mark, lay a sheet of paper loosely over it.
Sultanas are the pale seedless grapes long shipped from Smyrna, in what is now Turkey, and they reached British kitchens in growing quantity through the nineteenth century as steam shipping and the dried-fruit trade expanded. A cake like this one sits between the plain seed cake and the heavily spiced, brandy-fed Christmas cake: rich enough for a visitor, cheap enough for a Sunday. Its proportions look back to the old pound cake, equal weights of butter, sugar, flour and egg. Chemical raising agents such as the teaspoonful of baking powder here became widely available in British kitchens from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards; earlier cakes of this kind leant more on the air beaten into the butter and eggs, though yeast and carbonate of soda were also used.