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President's Fruit Cake
12 eggs. 1 lb. sugar (2 cups). 5 lbs. raisins. 1 glass grape jelly. 1 lb. crystallized cherries. 1 lb. crystallized pineapple. 1/4 lb. orange paste. 1 lb. blanched and ground almonds. 1 lb. pecans. 1 tablespoon cinnamon. 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg. 1 lb. butter (1 cup). 1 lb. flour (4 1/2 cups). 1 lb. home-made citron. 1 tablespoon of melted chocolate. 1/2 teaspoon allspice. 1/2 cup cordial mixed with spices. 1 cup whiskey or grape juice.
This is a formula rather than a method: Mrs. Wilson gives the weights and assumes the cook knows how a fruit cake is put together. Everything below fills in what the page leaves out.
- No method is givenStandard practice for a cake of this type is to cream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, add the melted chocolate, jelly and spirits, then fold in the spiced flour and last the fruit and nuts, which should be dredged in a little of the flour so they do not sink. There is no baking powder or soda here; the twelve eggs are the entire leavening.
- The butter conversion is wrongA pound of butter is 2 cups, not 1 cup as printed. Use the pound weight and ignore the parenthesis. The pound of sugar as 2 cups is right for granulated.
- Flour by weight, not by cup4 1/2 cups reflects the softer, un-sifted flour of 1920 and a lightly packed cup. Modern all-purpose flour runs roughly 3 1/2 cups to the pound. Weigh it.
- Crystallized fruit and orange paste"Crystallized" cherries and pineapple are candied glace fruit, sold today as glace cherries and candied pineapple. Orange paste appears to be a thick candied orange preserve; candied orange peel minced fine, or a firm bitter marmalade reduced down, would stand in for it.
- Home-made citron"Home-made citron" would be candied citron melon rind. Commercial candied citron is the direct substitute, and a pound of it is a great deal by modern taste.
- "Cordial mixed with spices"Genuinely ambiguous. It means a sweet fruit liqueur the household had on hand, infused with whole spices. Any fruit cordial or brandy will serve; the half cup is not structural.
- Oven and timeA cake of this size -- the listed ingredients total something like sixteen pounds -- wants a slow oven at 275-300F, the pans lined with several layers of paper, and three to four hours or more depending on how it is divided. Test with a skewer rather than by the clock.
- Yield and keepingThis makes on the order of 14-15 lb of cake, enough to fill several large tube pans or loaf tins. Fruit cakes of this composition were often wrapped in spirit-soaked cloth and aged for weeks; the whiskey acts as preservative as much as flavour, and the grape-juice version will not keep nearly as long.
Mrs. Mary A. Wilson wrote on cookery for the Ladies' Home Journal, and her cook book belongs to the years just after the First World War, when American household cookery was still shaped by wartime substitution. Two details suggest the period. The alternative of "1 cup whiskey or grape juice" reads as a Prohibition-era accommodation of the kind found in cookbooks of the early 1920s, and the call for "home-made citron" points to a time when candying your own melon rind was ordinary thrift rather than a project. Grand fruit cakes were often given presidential or patriotic names in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American books, generally without any documented connection to a particular president; the title signals scale and expense more than provenance.