Risen Cake
1½ pound flour. 1 pound sugar. 9 ounces butter. 3 gills milk. 1/4 pint yeast. 4 eggs.
Work the butter and sugar together. Put the yeast in the flour and one-half the butter and sugar the overnight; then mix the milk in, and beat it some time. Set it where it will rise. In the morning, when well risen, mix in the remainder of the butter and sugar, and the eggs, also some currants or raisins, or both, if you wish them, a little nutmeg or mace, and beat all well together for some time. Then put it in the pan and set it to rise again. It must be very light before you put it in the oven. It requires some time to soak.--Mrs. I.H.
A yeast-raised butter cake of the sort that stood between bread and modern chemically leavened cake. It is a two-day project, and the overnight sponge is what makes it work.
- The measurements in modern terms1 1/2 lb flour is about 5 1/2 cups; 1 lb sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; 9 oz butter is 2 sticks plus 2 tablespoons. Three gills of milk is 1 1/2 cups (a gill is half a cup).
- The quarter-pint of yeastThis means half a cup of liquid yeast — homemade barm or brewer's yeast, mostly water by volume. There is no exact modern conversion; a common working substitute is about 2 teaspoons of instant yeast, with the sponge liquid increased by roughly half a cup to make up the difference.
- What "soak" meansIn nineteenth-century usage a rich cake "soaks" oughly, bakes slowly and thoroughly so the centre sets without the crust hardening. The recipe gives no oven heat; a moderate oven, in modern terms somewhere around 325-350F rather than a hot one, is a reasonable reading.
- Baking time and panThe original gives none. This much batter fills a large tube pan or two loaf pans, and at 350F wants roughly an hour to an hour and a quarter; test with a skewer.
- Butter and sugar in two stagesHalf the enrichment goes into the overnight sponge, half in the morning. Adding all the fat and sugar at the start would slow the yeast, which is likely why the recipe splits it.
- The second rise is the hinge"It must be very light before you put it in the oven" is the whole instruction. After the eggs and remaining butter go in, the batter is heavy and slow; give it as long as it needs in a warm place, often two hours or more, until visibly puffed.
- Fruit and spiceCurrants or raisins are optional and go in with the morning mixing. Toss them in a little of the measured flour first so they do not sink through the slack batter.
- YieldA large cake, twelve to sixteen servings. It is best on the day it is baked and stales quickly, as yeast cakes do.
Risen cake belongs to the long era before baking powder, when the leavening in a Virginia kitchen was often the same yeast that raised the bread — a liquid barm kept alive from batch to batch, or begged from a neighbor. The technique is essentially that of a sweet enriched dough worked wet enough to beat rather than knead, and its relatives run from English saffron cake to German kugelhopf to the Sally Lunn that appears elsewhere in this book. Marion Cabell Tyree's Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878) collected such recipes from named contributors — here Mrs. I.H. — at a moment when chemical leavens were spreading fast, and the older method was starting to look like a heirloom rather than the default. The absence of any oven temperature is typical: a cook judged a wood-fired oven by hand and habit.</history>