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Fruit Cake
1/2 lbs. (3 cups) sugar I 6 eggs 1 pint (2 cups) sour cream 1 teaspoonful soda 1¾ lbs. (7 cups) flour I grated nutmeg ½ teaspoonful powdered mace 1 lb. currants 1 lb. Sultana raisins 1½ lb. chopped citron peel I lemon 1 teaspoonful rose extract 1/4 teaspoonful salt Cream the butter and sugar together, add gradually the yolks of the eggs well beaten, the soda mixed with the cream, flour, salt, spices, grated rind and strained lemon juice, the chopped citron peel, currants, rose extract, raisins, and the whites of eggs beaten stiffly. Mix carefully, turn into a large buttered casserole, and bake for two and a half hours in a steady oven.
A large, old-fashioned fruit cake of the sour-cream-and-soda school rather than the baking-powder school. The quantities are given by weight first, with cup equivalents alongside, and the fruit alone runs to roughly three and a half pounds.
- Read the "I" as a 1Throughout the ingredient list the numeral one is set as a capital I: I pint sour cream, I teaspoonful soda, I lb. currants, I lemon. Similarly "134 lbs. (7 cups) flour" is 13⁄4 lbs.
- ButterThe method opens by creaming butter and sugar, but no butter quantity survives in the list. Rich cakes of this kind often take butter of the same order as the sugar, but the exact figure is unrecoverable from this page.
- A steady oven"Steady" here means an even, unchanging moderate heat held for the full two and a half hours; the page gives no temperature, and a low modern setting in the region of 300-325F is the usual equivalent. A rich cake of this bulk darkens quickly, so cover the top loosely with foil if it colours early.
- The casserole is the baking vesselThe recipe bakes the batter in a large buttered casserole; the page does not say what it is made of. Butter it well and line the base with parchment; the batter is dense and will stick.
- Soda and sour creamThe teaspoonful of soda is dissolved in the cream and provides the chemical leavening, with the stiffly beaten egg whites adding lift as well. Do not substitute baking powder for the soda; the soda is there to work with the acid in the cream.
- Sultana raisins and citronSultanas are golden seedless raisins. Candied citron peel is still sold at Christmas or from baking suppliers; candied orange and lemon peel is an acceptable stand-in. Toss the fruit with a few spoonfuls of the measured flour before folding it in so it does not sink.
- Rose extractRose flavouring was a common cake perfume into the early twentieth century. Present-day rose extracts and rose waters vary enormously in strength; start with half the teaspoonful.
- Yield and testingThis makes a very large cake: the listed ingredients alone come to something like nine or ten pounds of batter before baking. A skewer in the centre should come out clean. Cool completely in the pot before turning out, and let it rest wrapped for a day or two before cutting.
Fruit cakes like this one belong to a long English tradition of keeping cakes, weighed out in pounds of butter, sugar, flour and dried fruit and baked slowly for hours so they would hold for weeks in a tin. The sour cream and soda point to an American household version: before commercial baking powder was universal, soda slaked in soured milk or cream was a common way to lift a heavy batter. Rose water and rose extract generally tended to perfume sweet baking before vanilla became the default flavouring.