Home › Recipes › French Nougat Cake
French Nougat Cake
3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder teaspoons 2 squares melted chocolate, added last 1 cup water 2 lbs. raisins 2 lbs. currants 1 lb. brown sugar 3/8 lb. citron Pinch of salt 1¾ cups sugar 1/2 cup butter 4 eggs
This entry has come down to us badly scrambled — the ingredients are run together, the method is missing entirely, and the quantities look like two different cakes collided on the page. Read it as a shopping list to be reconstructed, not a set of directions.
- The text is corrupt"3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder teaspoons" and "13/4 cups sugar" are typesetting or scanning damage; the latter is most likely 1¾ cups. No flour is listed at all, and the original figure is simply lost.
- Two recipes in oneFour pounds of dried fruit plus a pound of brown sugar belongs to a boiled fruitcake or plum cake, while 1¾ cups sugar, ½ cup butter, 4 eggs and 2 squares of chocolate is a modest layer cake. Cakes called "nougat" in American books of this period often carried chopped nuts, and no nuts appear here at all. Treat the fruit-and-brown-sugar group and the butter-sugar-egg group as separate formulas.
- Calumet baking powderA double-acting powder (historically sodium aluminium sulphate with calcium acid phosphate), still sold. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes measure for measure; 3 level teaspoons falls in the range usually given for about 3 cups of flour.
- Squares of chocolateA square meant one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so 2 squares is 2 oz. "Added last" matters: melted chocolate stirred in at the end, off the heat and only just warm, keeps the batter from breaking.
- Citron3/8 lb is 6 oz of candied citron peel, the thick candied rind of a citrus fruit — not lemon zest and not the modern glacé cherry mix. It is sold at holidays and keeps for months; dice it small so it does not sink.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, a small raisin, not fresh red or black currants. Rinse and dry them, then toss the fruit in a little of the flour so it stays suspended in the batter.
- BakingNo temperature or time is given anywhere in the entry. By modern practice a heavy fruited cake of this weight would take a slow oven, around 300F, for two hours or more, while a plain butter cake of the second group would take about 350F for 30 to 35 minutes in layers. Test with a skewer rather than trusting a clock.
- YieldIf the fruit quantities are taken literally this is several pounds of cake -- two loaf tins at least. The butter-and-egg portion alone would make roughly two 8-inch layers.
Reliable Recipes was one of the long series of promotional cookbooks issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, which is why the leavening is named by brand in the ingredient list itself; such booklets were given away or sold for a few cents. "Nougat" in American cake naming of the period seems rarely to have meant the chewy French confection of egg white and honey o to cakes carrying chopped almonds or walnuts, or finished with a boiled-sugar frosting that set firm like nougat, with "French" plausibly serving mainly as a mark of refinement. The candied citron, currants and raisins here point to the older tradition of the keeping cake, made in quantity and stored for weeks, which persisted in these booklets alongside the quick chemically leavened layer cakes the baking-powder companies were promoting.