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Currant Cake
Add one cup currants to Simple Butter Cake. Bake in loaves or rounds.
A one-line variation that assumes you have the book's Simple Butter Cake in front of you — a standard creamed butter-and-egg batter of the period, roughly 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 2 eggs, 2 cups flour, 1/2 cup milk and 2 teaspoons baking powder. The points below cover what the instruction leaves unsaid.
- Currants means driedThese are Zante currants — small dried grapes sold near the raisins — not the fresh red or black berries. Fresh currants would wreck the batter's moisture balance.
- Keep the fruit suspendedA cup of currants is heavy for a plain butter batter and will settle to the bottom. Toss them with a tablespoon of the measured flour before folding them in at the very end, and do not overwork the batter afterward.
- Plump them first, brieflyIf your currants are hard and dry, a five-minute soak in hot water, then drained and patted dry, keeps them from pulling moisture out of the crumb.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven direction; a butter cake of this type is usually baked at a moderate heat, around 350F.
- Loaves or roundsA batter of this size will roughly fill one 8x4-inch loaf pan or two 8-inch rounds. Reckon on 50 to 60 minutes for a loaf, 25 to 30 for rounds, and test the loaf early — the fruit makes it look darker and done before it is.
- YieldRoughly one loaf of about 10 slices, or a two-layer round serving 8 to 10. Cakes of this kind were commonly served plain rather than frosted.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other manufacturer-sponsored books of the period it promotes its own product in the confectionery chapters while filling out the rest with straightforward domestic baking. This entry works as a one-line variation on a foundation recipe, Simple Butter Cake. Currant cake belongs to a long English tradition of plainish tea cakes studded with dried fruit, and the small dried grapes called currants take their name from Corinth, by way of the Anglo-French "raisins de Corauntz." A cake like this was everyday baking rather than a company dish, sturdy enough to keep a few days in a tin.