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Mount Vernon Fruit Cake
1 nutmeg, and a little mace 1 lb. raisins, seeded ½ lb. sugar 1/2 lb. butter 1 pt. sour cream 1 lb. currants 1 t soda 1 C shredded citron grated rind 2 lemons and juice 1¾ lbs. flour of 1 6 eggs Cream the butter and sugar; add the lemon and juice, then the yolks of eggs, well beaten. Then add the sour cream (with spices and soda) and flour alternately; then the whites of eggs, well beaten. Beat the mixture about five minutes, then add the fruit, floured. Stir just enough to mix in the fruit. Bake about two hours in a moderate oven. While baking, cover with buttered paper and line pan with greased paper. 1 C shortening Mrs. M. Pester.
The ingredient list has been scrambled in transcription — the columns of the original page ran together — so read it as a set of proportions rather than a clean list. The method itself is sound and follows the standard sour-cream fruit cake pattern.
- The flour quantityThe printed page reads 1¾ lbs. flour, which is what our text now gives — roughly six to seven cups. Add it gradually, alternating with the sour cream, until the batter is thick enough to hold the fruit suspended.
- The stray shortening"1 C shortening" printed after the signature sits outside the method and may have strayed in from adjacent type on the page. The cake is creamed with ½ lb butter, and the instructions never call for shortening.
- Lemon rind"grated rind 2 lemons and juice ... of 1" resolves as the rind of two lemons and the juice of one. More juice than that will thin the creamed butter and sugar.
- Sour cream and sodaA pint is two cups. Period sour cream was thick, genuinely soured, and acidic enough to react fully with the teaspoon of soda; modern cultured sour cream works, but avoid reduced-fat versions, which carry gums and more water.
- Whole nutmegOne whole nutmeg grated is about 2 to 2½ teaspoons — assertive but correct for a cake this size. Add the mace to about half a teaspoon.
- Moderate oven325 to 350F. Given the two-hour bake and the density of fruit, the lower end is safer; a dark or heavy loaf pan will want 325F.
- Flouring the fruitTossing the raisins, currants and citron in a spoonful of the measured flour keeps them from sinking. Fold only until distributed — the five minutes of beating happens before the fruit goes in, not after.
- The paperLine the pan with greased paper and lay a buttered sheet loosely over the top, as the recipe directs, for most of the bake. Without it the exposed fruit at the surface can scorch before the centre sets.
- Doneness and yieldThe ingredients come to some 6 to 7 lb of batter, so this needs considerably more pan room than two 9x5 loaves — a large tube pan plus a loaf, or several tins. A skewer in the centre should come out clean of batter, though it will pick up moisture from the fruit. Wrap and keep several days before cutting.
Cakes bearing Washington's name — Mount Vernon, Martha Washington, Washington Pie — proliferated in American community cookbooks from the late nineteenth century onward, usually with no documented connection to the household at Mount Vernon; the name signalled patriotic gentility and a certain richness of ingredients rather than a traced provenance. What is genuinely period about this one is the sour cream and soda: before baking powder was cheap and reliable, cooks leavened heavy fruit cakes with an acid dairy and a measured teaspoon of saleratus or soda, and the fat in the cream did double duty in keeping a dense, fruit-laden crumb tender. Books of this sort were assembled from handwritten slips submitted by contributors — Mrs. Pester's among them — and typeset with more haste than editing, which is also how a stray cup of shortening ends up at the bottom of a fruit cake.