Wedding Cake
4 lbs. butter 4 lbs. sugar 4 lbs. flour 4 lbs. citron 4 lbs. raisins 1/2 pt. wine or grape juice 16 lbs. currants 1 pt. molasses 4 nutmegs 4 dozen of eggs 1 cup Slade's cloves, Slade's cinnamon, Slade's mace, mixed together, making 1 cup in all Bake 3½ hours. In all, it should weigh 60 lbs. Better to have it baked at the baker, for so much depends on the baking.
— Mrs. James H. Proffit
This is a full-size old-style wedding fruitcake, built to be cut into hundreds of small squares and boxed for guests rather than eaten as dessert at the table. Before anything else, decide what fraction of it you actually want: at the quantities given the batter runs to roughly sixty pounds.
- Scale it down firstDivide every quantity by eight and you still have a cake of some seven or eight pounds, a generous two-tier wedding cake by current standards.
- The fruit-to-batter ratioTwenty-four pounds of fruit against four pounds of flour means the flour is a binder, not a structure. Toss the currants, raisins and citron in a little of the weighed flour before folding them in or they will sink and scorch on the bottom.
- Slade's spicesD. & L. Slade Co. of Boston was a widely sold spice house of the period; the brand name carries no special meaning now. Use any good ground cloves, cinnamon and mace in equal parts to make up the cup called for, and grind the nutmegs fresh.
- Currants and citronCurrants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. Citron is candied citron peel, sold in blocks or diced at holiday time; candied mixed peel is the usual substitute.
- EggsEggs of the period were smaller and less uniform than today's large eggs. Weigh rather than count if you are scaling: reckon roughly 1 lb 5 oz of shelled egg per dozen modern large eggs, and match the original by weight against the butter.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven heat of its own. A cake this dense wants a slow oven, around 275-300F, with the tins lined in a double thickness of parchment and wrapped outside in brown paper to shield the crust. At 3 1/2 hours the timing appears to assume the batter is divided among several tins rather than baked as one sixty-pound mass.
- DonenessA skewer will not come out clean from a cake this wet with fruit. Judge by a firm top that springs back, edges pulling slightly from the tin, and an internal temperature around 200-205F.
- Why the bakerMrs. Proffit's advice still holds for the full quantity: a domestic oven cannot hold an even low heat under that load. If you make the whole thing, bake it in manageable tins in batches.
- KeepingWrap the cooled cake in cheesecloth moistened with the wine or grape juice, then in foil, and hold it in a cool place for several weeks. This cake improves with keeping, and fruitcakes of this type were often made well ahead of the wedding.
The dark, currant-heavy wedding cake is the American descendant of the British bride's cake, a spiced fruit cake weighted with dried fruit and preserved peel. Sixty pounds sounds absurd until you remember its purpose: the cake was cut into small squares, boxed and given to guests to take home, and slices were traditionally kept or slept upon by unmarried women, a familiar piece of period folklore. The instruction to send it to the baker is a real glimpse of the era's kitchens, where a wood or coal range could not be trusted to hold a low steady heat for hours. The Philathea Cook Book came out of the Philathea movement, the adult women's Bible-class organization that spread through Protestant Sunday schools around the turn of the twentieth century and raised funds through community recipe collections; the contributor's name attached to each recipe was part of the point.