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Luncheon Cake
Ingredients.
One pound of Vienna Flour (sifted).
Half a pound of Butter.
Half a pound of Castor Sugar.
Half a pound of Sultanas.
Six ounces of mixed Peel.
The Rind of two Lemons.
One large teaspoonful of Yeatman's
The page breaks off mid-ingredient, so what survives is a shopping list rather than a method: a rich 1 lb-flour fruit cake of the plain, sliceable sort meant for the middle of the day. The notes below cover the archaic ingredients and the shape the missing instructions almost certainly took.
- The recipe is incompleteThe text stops at "One large teaspoonful of Yeatman's" and no eggs, liquid or oven instruction survive. A cake on this scale would probably have taken four to six eggs and a little milk; anyone baking from this page is reconstructing, not following.
- Yeatman'sYeatman's Yeast Powder was a British chemical raising agent of the period, sold in tins alongside brands like Borwick's. It functions as baking powder, and a level to slightly heaped teaspoon of modern baking powder stands in for the "large teaspoonful" here.
- Vienna flourA commercial grade of finely roller-milled white flour, pale and very fine, associated with the Austrian and Hungarian mills that popularised the process. Ordinary plain or all-purpose flour is the closest modern equivalent; there is no need to seek out bread flour.
- Castor sugarSuperfine sugar, with a grain small enough to cream smoothly into cold-ish butter. Granulated sugar buzzed briefly in a food processor does the same job.
- Sultanas and mixed peelSultanas are golden raisins. "Mixed peel" is candied orange and lemon peel, sold diced; six ounces is a generous amount by modern taste and is what gives this cake its bitter-sweet edge. Toss the fruit in a spoonful of the weighed flour so it does not sink.
- Lemon rindZest only, from two lemons, taken finely and rubbed into the sugar before creaming. Any white pith carried over will turn bitter over the long bake.
- Tin and ovenA pound of flour with equal weights of butter and sugar fills a lined 8-inch round or 7-inch square deep tin. No oven instruction survives; for a cake this rich, around 325°F for somewhere near an hour and three quarters is a reasonable reconstruction, covered with paper once the top has coloured.
- YieldThe listed ingredients alone come to nearly 3 lb, so expect upwards of 3 lb of finished cake once eggs are added. It keeps well wrapped for a week and, like most heavy fruit cakes, cuts better on the second day.
Luncheon cake sits between the plain seed cakes of the tea table and the heavily fruited, brandy-fed cakes kept for Christmas and weddings. It was meant to be cut at midday, when luncheon was a light meal rather than a full course, and its virtue was that it kept in a tin for a week without drying. The named ingredients help date the page: Vienna flour and proprietary tinned raising powders such as Yeatman's belong to the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, when British baking was shifting towards standardised flours and shop-bought chemical leavening.