Plum Cake, Common
INGREDIENTS for large cake.-3 lbs. of flour, 6 oz. of butter or good dripping, 6 oz. of moist sugar, 6 oz. of currants, 1/2 oz. of pounded allspice, 2 tablespoonfuls of fresh yeast, 1 pint of new milk. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Rub the butter into the flour; add the sugar, currants and allspice; warm the milk, stir to it the yeast, and mix the whole into a dough; knead it well, and put it into 6 buttered tins; place them near the fire for nearly an hour for the dough to rise, then bake the cakes in a good oven from 1 to 14 hour. To ascertain when they are done, plunge a clean knife into the middle, and if on withdrawal it comes out clean, the cakes are done.
TIME.-1 to 1 hour.
This is a yeast-raised fruit bread rather than a creamed butter cake, and it is built on a Victorian scale: 3 lb of flour split between six tins. Halving or quartering the quantities works without adjustment.
- "Plum" means currantsNo plums are involved. In British baking of this period plum cake, plum pudding and plum duff all take dried vine fruit; here it is 6 oz of currants to 3 lb of flour, which is a very lean hand by modern standards.
- Moist sugarMoist sugar is unrefined or partly refined soft sugar, closest today to light brown or golden caster sugar. Ordinary white granulated will work but gives a paler, flatter-tasting crumb.
- DrippingGood dripping is fat rendered from roast meat, usually beef, and would have been the cheaper of the two options the recipe offers. It gives a savoury edge; butter behaves much the same way in the rubbing-in.
- Yeast quantityTwo tablespoonfuls of 'fresh yeast' here probably means brewer's barm rather than modern compressed yeast, which makes any conversion approximate; if read as compressed yeast it is roughly 1 oz (25-30 g), or on the usual 3:1 ratio about 3 teaspoons of instant dried yeast for the full 3 lb of flour. Nineteenth-century barm was less reliable than modern yeast, so err on the low side and give it time.
- The dough is very stiffOne pint of milk to 3 lb of flour is around 40 per cent hydration, far drier than a modern bread dough. Expect something closer to a bun dough; if it will not come together, add warm milk a spoonful at a time rather than forcing it.
- Milk temperature"Warm the milk" means blood heat, about 100F/38C. Hotter than roughly 120F/50C will kill the yeast before it starts.
- RisingAn hour near the fire assumes a cool Victorian kitchen with one hot spot. In a modern room, allow 1 to 1.5 hours at ordinary warmth, or until the dough has visibly grown and springs back slowly when pressed.
- Oven heatA 'good oven' for a yeasted cake of this size is probably somewhere around 375-400F (190-200C), though the term is imprecise. Six tins from 3 lb of flour makes loaves of about 1 lb each; the recipe allows 1 to 1 1/4 hours, which is generous for that size, so start testing earlier with a knife or skewer as directed.
- AllspiceHalf an ounce of pounded allspice is about 7 teaspoons (a little over 2 tablespoons) of ground berries across the whole batch. Pre-ground allspice fades fast, so grind whole berries if you have them.
Common plum cake sits at the plain end of a family that runs all the way up to the fruit-crammed rich cakes of the same books. The distinguishing feature is the raising: before chemical leavens took hold, the cheap version of a fruit cake was a bread dough enriched with a little fat, sugar and currants and left to rise with barm from the brewer, while the rich version is generally said to have depended on eggs beaten by hand. Yeasted fruit loaves of this kind survive in regional British baking as lardy cake, Cornish saffron cake and the various "fruit loaves" of the north. The costing of 1s 6d for six good-sized cakes is the point of the recipe: Beeton's books were written for households keeping a close eye on the weekly book, and the option of dripping in place of butter is offered in exactly that spirit.