Home › Fancy Bread and Cakes › Rich Plum Cake
Rich Plum Cake
Ingredients.
One pound of fresh Butter.
One pound of Castor Sugar.
One pound of Mixed Peel.
One teaspoonful of Salt. One ounce of Allspice. One pound and a half of Flour.
One pound of dried Cherries.
One pound of Sultana Raisins.
Eight ounces of Almonds.
Half a pint of Brandy.
This is a formula rather than a full method: the book gives quantities and leaves the making to the cook. Read it as a set of proportions for a very large Victorian fruit cake, and note the gaps before you commit a pound of butter to it.
- The method is missingNo mixing, tin, temperature or time is given. Treat this as the ingredient half of a rich fruit cake and follow standard practice: cream butter and sugar, beat in eggs, fold in flour and fruit last.
- And so are the eggsA batter built on a pound each of butter, sugar and flour would need roughly eight to ten eggs to bind and lift it. Whether they were dropped from the printed list or simply taken for granted cannot be told from the page; either way the mixture will not hold together without them.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar, finer than granulated and quicker to cream with butter. Granulated will work but needs longer beating.
- Mixed peel and dried cherriesMixed peel is candied citron, lemon and orange peel, sold ready-chopped. "Dried cherries" here most likely means candied or glace cherries rather than the modern tart dried cherry; if using glace, halve and rinse off the syrup coating so they do not sink.
- AlmondsEight ounces, blanched and either chopped or ground. Whole almonds are sometimes arranged over the top before baking, though that is more closely associated with Dundee cake than with this list.
- Half a pint of brandyThat is 10 fl oz in British measure, about 1 1/4 cups, which is a great deal in one batter. A common approach is to steep the fruit overnight in part of it and spoon the rest over the cake after baking, a little at a time.
- OvenThe book gives no oven or timing. For a cake of this weight a modern equivalent would be a slow oven, around 300F, for three and a half to four hours, dropping to 275F if the top colours early; line the tin with a double layer of parchment and tie a band of paper round the outside. None of this comes from the original.
- YieldThe listed ingredients alone total 7 lb before any eggs or brandy, so expect something nearer 8 lb of finished cake -- more than one 10-inch round tin will take, so divide it between two tins. Test with a skewer to the centre; well wrapped it will keep for months.
"Plum" in a cake of this sort has nothing to do with plums: into the eighteenth century the word covered raisins and dried fruit generally, and it stuck to the name long after the fruit list had expanded to peel, cherries and sultanas. Cakes like this one were made in quantity because they kept: the sugar, candied fruit and brandy together preserve the crumb for months, which is why the same formula underlies wedding and christening cakes. Its presentation as bare proportions with no method tells you who the book was for -- a cook or confectioner who already knew how to build a creamed batter and needed only the weights.