Plum Cake, A Nice
INGREDIENTS.-1 lb. of flour, 1/2 lb. of butter, 1/2 lb. of sugar, 1/2 lb. of currants, 2 oz. of candied lemon-peel, 1/2 pint of milk, 1 teaspoonful of ammonia or carbonate of soda. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Put the flour into a basin, with the sugar, currants and sliced candied-peel; beat the butter to a cream, and mix all these ingredients together with the milk. Stir the ammonia into 2 tablespoonfuls of milk; add it to the dough, and beat the whole well, until everything is thoroughly mixed, Put the dough into a buttered tin, and bake the cake from 1 to 2 hours.
TIME -1 to 2 hours.
SEASONABLE at any time. - To Plum Jam.
INGREDIENTS. every lb. of plums, weighed before being stoned, allow 1/4 lb. of loaf sugar.
In making plum jam, the quantity of sugar to each lb. of fruit must be regulated by the quality and size of the fruit, some plums requiring much more sugar than others. Divide the plums, take out the stones; and put them on to large dishes, with roughly-pounded sugar sprinkled over them in the above proportion, and let them stirred all the time, or it will burn at the bottom of the pan, and so spoil the colour and flavour of the preserve. Some of the stones should be cracked, and a few kernels added to the jam just before it is done; these impart a very delicious flavour to the plums. The above proportion of sugar Would answer for Orleans plums; the Impératrice, Magnum-bonum and Winesour would not require quite so much.
TIME.- hour to simmer gently; to boil rapidly. hour SEASONABLE. From the end of July to the beginning of October.
Two recipes have run together on this page, and both have suffered in transcription: several quantities and times are missing outright. The cake is a plain, eggless fruit loaf; the jam carries an instruction that no current preserving guide would repeat.
- The cracked stonesBeeton directs that some plum stones be cracked and the kernels added to the jam. Plum kernels contain amygdalin, which breaks down when the kernel is crushed and wetted to release hydrogen cyanide along with benzaldehyde, the bitter-almond flavour the recipe is chasing — the same chemistry that makes bitter almonds dangerous. Use a current plum jam recipe.
- Missing quantitiesThe butter and sugar weights have dropped out of the text ("lb. of butter, lb. of sugar"), as has part of the jam's timing ("hour to simmer gently; to boil rapidly. hour"). Do not guess at them from the surrounding words.
- Ammonia"Ammonia" here is ammonium carbonate, baker's ammonia or hartshorn, still sold for biscuits and some continental baking. It works well in thin, dry goods where the gas escapes fully, but in a deep, moist cake it can leave a distinct ammoniacal smell and taste. Carbonate of soda, the alternative Beeton offers, is bicarbonate of soda.
- Half a pint of milkAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups — not 8 oz. The extra two tablespoons for slaking the raising agent are on top of that.
- Oven heatNo oven instruction is given at all; the text says only to bake. Around 325–350F is a reasonable modern guess for a cake of this size over the stated one to two hours; test with a skewer rather than trusting the clock, since the range given is enormous.
- Currants and peelCurrants are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Candied lemon-peel in 1861 came in whole caps to be sliced; modern chopped mixed peel is a fair substitute at the same weight.
- Loaf sugarIn the jam recipe, loaf sugar is refined white sugar sold in a cone and broken up — ordinary granulated or preserving sugar is the equivalent. A quarter pound of sugar to a pound of fruit is a very low ratio by modern standards and produces a soft, short-keeping preserve.
- YieldA pound of flour with the fruit and milk makes a large cake, though with the butter and sugar weights missing the exact quantity cannot be pinned down; broadly, one deep 8-inch round tin or two loaf tins.
The "plum" in plum cake has nothing to do with plums; from the seventeenth century onward the word stood for raisins, currants and dried fruit generally, and it survives in plum pudding and plum duff on the same principle. What distinguishes this version is what it lacks — no eggs, no brandy, no spice, and a chemical raising agent standing in for the labour of beating. At a shilling it was among the cheaper cakes in the book, and it sits in Beeton's pages alongside much grander fruit cakes as the plain option. The volatile alkali it uses, hartshorn or baker's ammonia, was one of the leaveners in use before commercial baking powders became cheap and reliable in the later nineteenth century; it is named for the hartshorn shavings from which the salt was once distilled. The jam that follows it here is tied to the English plum harvest between late July and early October.