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Martha Washington Fruit Cake
1/2 pound butter or shortening 1 1/2 pounds sugar 6 eggs 1 3/4 pounds flour 1 teaspoon soda 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 grated nutmeg 1/4 teaspoon mace 2 cups sour cream 1 pound chopped raisins 1 pound well-cleaned currants 1/2 pound sliced citron Juice and rind of 1 lemon Cream the butter or shortening and add the sugar. Gradually add the well-beaten egg-yolks. Mix and sift the dry ingredients and add alternately with the cream. Add the raisins, currants, citron well floured, and lemon. Mix well. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg-whites. Turn into paper-lined loaf-cake pans and cover the tops with greased paper. Bake slowly at 320 degrees F., about two and one-half hours.
A large keeping cake by weight rather than volume, leavened with soda against sour cream. Scale the ingredients rather than measuring them by cup and it behaves predictably.
- Weigh everything1 3/4 lb flour is roughly 795 g, or somewhere between 5 3/4 and 6 1/4 cups depending on how it is measured; 1 1/2 lb sugar is 680 g, about 3 1/3 cups; 1/2 lb butter is two sticks. Cup conversions on a batter this large compound quickly, so a scale is the difference between a moist cake and a dry one.
- The soda and the sour cream are one systemThere is no baking powder here. The acid in the cream is the only thing that will activate the teaspoon of soda, so use full-fat cultured sour cream or buttermilk, not creme fraiche or a low-fat product thickened with gums. Get the batter into the pans and into the oven without a long pause.
- 320F is not a mistakeIt is deliberately below normal cake heat because a dense fruit batter needs two and a half hours to reach the centre without the outside scorching. Use a conventional setting; a convection fan at this temperature will dry the crust before the middle sets.
- Paper lining and paper lidLine the tins with parchment up the sides, and lay a sheet of greased parchment loosely over the top for the first two hours. The cover is what keeps the surface pale and soft over such a long bake; remove it for the last twenty minutes if you want colour.
- A grated nutmegOne whole nutmeg grated fine comes to roughly 2 to 3 teaspoons, which is a great deal by modern standards but correct for the volume of batter. Grate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg at that quantity tastes dusty.
- Citron and currantsCitron means candied citron peel, sold in the baking aisle mainly around the winter holidays; candied orange or mixed peel substitutes acceptably. Currants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. "Well-cleaned" refers to picking over and rinsing off stems and grit, rarely necessary with packaged fruit today.
- Flour the fruitToss the raisins, currants and citron in a few spoonfuls taken from the measured flour before folding them in, or two and a half pounds of fruit will settle to the bottom of the batter.
- Yield and donenessThe batter runs to about eight pounds, enough for two large loaf tins or three medium ones. Test with a skewer at the centre after two and a quarter hours; the crumb should be set but still visibly moist.
- KeepingCool completely in the tins, then wrap in parchment and foil. A cake of this density improves over a week or two and will hold for a month in a cool cupboard; it also freezes well.
Martha Washington's name was attached to all manner of American cakes, candies and pies through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, usually as a mark of patriotic respectability rather than any documented connection to the first First Lady. A genuine manuscript cookery book did descend through her family and is now at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, but the great majority of dishes bearing her name in printed cookbooks, this one included, have no traceable link to it. What the recipe really represents is the American keeping cake: an enormous quantity of dried fruit bound with just enough batter to hold it, baked long and low, and made to last through a season rather than a week. The sour-cream-and-soda leavening is the older method, predating reliable baking powder, and survived in fruit cakes long after it had disappeared from lighter baking.