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Imperial Cake
2 cups seeded raisins 1½ cups currants 1 cup citron ½ cup candied orange peel 4 cup brandy 3 egg whites ½ teaspoon salt Mix as Butter Cake, adding fruit last. Bake in buttered and papered pans in a moderate oven one hour.
This is a satellite recipe: the batter itself lives under "Butter Cake" elsewhere in the book, and what appears here is only the fruit, the whites and the brandy. Read it as a variation, not a standalone formula.
- The missing half of the recipeThere is no butter, sugar or flour listed because the instruction "Mix as Butter Cake" sends you back to the master recipe. Without that base, the ingredients above are a bowl of soaked fruit. The book's own Butter Cake proportions are not reproduced here; if you cannot consult them, substitute any plain butter-cake batter of comparable size and use the three whites in place of whole eggs.
- "4 cup brandy"Almost certainly a typesetting loss of the fraction; a quarter, a half or three-quarters of a cup are all plausible readings, and four cups of brandy would drown the batter. Where a measurement is this ambiguous it is safer to start low.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 350F. For a dense fruited loaf of this size, 325F is the more forgiving number, since an hour at 350F will set the outside well before the middle of a heavily loaded batter is done.
- Buttered and papered pansLine the pan with parchment as well as greasing it. Candied fruit sinks to the bottom and caramelises against the metal; the paper is what lets the cake come out whole.
- CurrantsZante currants, the small dried grape, not fresh red or black currants. They are sold near the raisins.
- CitronCandied citron peel, from the citrus fruit of that name (citron melon was sometimes used as a cheaper substitute). Once easy to find at holiday baking time and now a specialty item. Candied lemon peel is the usual substitute, though it is sharper and less resinous.
- Whites onlyUsing three whites rather than whole eggs is deliberate: this is a white or "light" fruit cake, meant to stay pale around the fruit. Whip them separately and fold them in if the master recipe allows, or the batter will be tight.
- Fruit lastToss the raisins, currants, citron and peel with a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in at the very end. Stirring them through early breaks them up and streaks the batter grey.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe says "pans" in the plural, so expect enough batter for more than one; the exact yield depends on the master butter-cake base. Like most brandied fruit cakes it improves after a few days wrapped and kept cool.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that, like Baker's and Rumford, published a general household cookbook partly as advertising. Imperial cake belongs to the family of pale fruit cakes that American cooks distinguished from the dark, molasses-and-spice "black" cake: the eggs are whites only, and the flavour comes from candied peel and brandy rather than treacle. Names like Imperial and Queen's were applied loosely in nineteenth-century books to signal a cake rich in fruit and butter, and the recipes vary widely from one collection to the next. The construction here, a one-line variation hung off a master butter-cake recipe, is characteristic of the period's cookbooks, which assumed a reader who had already worked through the foundational pages and did not need them repeated.