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Raised Fruit Cake
1/2 yeast cake dissolved in one half cup water 2 eggs + cup wine 2 cups seeded raisins 1 cup citron Mix all ingredients except eggs and fruit. Raise over night. In the morning add eggs and fruit; cover and raise again; pour into buttered and papered pans; let it rise one hour. Bake in moderate oven one and one half to two hours. cup butter 1½ cups sugar 3 egg yolks 2½ cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder + cup milk
The text has come through with several fractions lost, so treat the ingredient list as a sketch rather than a formula. What survives is a yeast-raised fruit cake of a type that had already begun to disappear when this book was printed.
- Missing quantitiesThe plus signs and bare "cup butter" are places where a fraction dropped out of the original setting — most likely ¼ or ½ cup wine, ½ cup milk and ½ cup butter, but the page as transcribed does not say. Anyone working from it is reconstructing, not following.
- Two leaveners, one cakeThe list gives both a yeast cake and three teaspoons of baking powder, which is unusual and may mean the printer's columns have run together. A dough given three rises, one of them overnight, does not need baking powder as well.
- Yeast cakeA yeast cake of the period is usually a small block of compressed yeast, though dry compressed cakes were also sold; it is commonly reckoned as roughly the equivalent of 2¼ teaspoons of modern active dry yeast. Dissolve it in water at about 105°F rather than anything hotter.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'moderate oven' is generally read as somewhere between 325°F and 375°F. For a fruit-heavy batter baked ninety minutes to two hours, the lower end is the safer reading — the sugar and dried fruit at the surface will darken well before the centre sets at 350°F.
- Buttered and papered pansThis means lining the pan with paper as well as greasing it, standard for long-baked fruit cakes to keep the sides from scorching. Parchment does the job; a double thickness around the outside is closer to the original intent.
- Seeded raisins'Seeded' means the seeds had been taken out, as opposed to naturally seedless fruit. By 1907 this was done both by hand in the kitchen and by machine in the packing houses, and seeded raisins were sold ready prepared. Any modern seedless raisin substitutes directly.
- CitronCandied citron peel, from a thick-rinded citrus grown mainly for preserving. It is still sold at holidays; candied lemon peel is the usual stand-in and is less bitter.
- The risesThree separate risings are called for — overnight, again after the eggs and fruit go in, then an hour in the pans. The fruit and butter make the dough sluggish, so judge by volume rather than the clock.
- YieldThe flour and sugar quantities suggest a single loaf-sized cake, or two small ones. Like most heavy fruit cakes it slices better after a day.
Before chemical leaveners were cheap and reliable, many raised cakes were raised with yeast, and a "raised cake" meant a sweetened, enriched bread dough rather than a batter, closer to the older English great cakes than to the dense brandy-soaked fruit cake of later Christmas tables. By the time Lowney's Cook Book appeared in 1907, baking powder had largely replaced yeast in the cake chapters of American books, and recipes like this one survived anyway. The book itself was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and was written to put its cocoa and chocolate in front of home cooks; that a plain wine-and-citron fruit cake with no chocolate in it earned a place shows the volume was meant to work as a general household cookbook first and an advertisement second.