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Caterers' Wedding Cake
2 pounds of sugar. 1 1/2 pounds of butter. 12 eggs. 2 pounds of flour. 8 tablespoonfuls of wine. Same of brandy. 6 nutmegs gronnd or grated. 5 pounds of raisins. 4 pounds of currants. 2 pounds of citrons. Stone the raisins, wash and dry t<??>ke currants, cut the citron small, then mix all three together and dust them with a cupful of flour. Mix the first four ingredients together the same as if for pound cake, add the liquors, nutmeg, and then the fruit.
Line the mold with buttered paper, and wrap another paper around the outside and tie it with twine. Bake the cake about three hours.
This is a full caterer's fruitcake: roughly eighteen pounds of batter and fruit, with no chemical leavening at all. Everything depends on how thoroughly you cream the butter and sugar and how gently you bake it.
- The hinge: creaming, not leaveningThere is no baking powder or soda here, so the only lift comes from air beaten into the butter and sugar and from the eggs. Cream the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy, then add the eggs one at a time so the batter never breaks.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no oven guidance at all, only a three-hour bake. For a cake this dense, modern practice is a slow oven, roughly 275-300F; hotter and the crust will set and brown long before the centre is done, and the fruit will scorch.
- DonenessJudge by a long skewer coming out clean and an internal temperature of about 200-205F, not by the clock. A cake of this size in a single mould can take four hours or more; divided among smaller pans, closer to two and a half.
- The paper liningButtered paper inside plus a paper collar tied round the outside is period insulation. Modern equivalent: a double layer of parchment inside the tin and a folded band of brown paper or newspaper tied around the sides, which keeps the outer inch from drying to leather.
- The nutmegA whole nutmeg grates down to roughly two to three teaspoons, so six is somewhere between four and six tablespoons -- a great deal even spread through eighteen pounds of cake. Two nutmegs, four to six teaspoons, reads as generously spiced to a modern palate.
- Currants and citron"Currants" are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants; "citron" is candied citron peel, sold in blocks or diced. If citron is hard to find, candied orange and lemon peel substitute cleanly by weight.
- Stoning the raisinsNineteenth-century raisins carried seeds. Use seedless raisins and skip that step entirely; the flour dusting still matters, as it keeps the fruit from sinking.
- The liquorsEight tablespoonfuls is half a cup each of wine and brandy. A fortified wine, madeira or sherry, gives the flavour the recipe assumes; table wine largely disappears.
- Yield and keepingThe ingredients come to roughly eighteen pounds of batter, and rather less once baked and the moisture driven off. Wrapped in brandy-dampened cloth and then foil, it improves for weeks and was meant to be made well ahead.
A wedding cake of this kind in America was a dark, fruit-laden pound cake, stiff enough to be layered and iced, and firm enough to travel in slices as a keepsake. The proportions here belong to the tradition of the English "great cake", in which sugar, butter, eggs and flour were balanced by weight and the fruit could outweigh all four together. The title matters: this is the caterer's version, scaled for a trade kitchen rather than a household, which is why the quantities are given in flat pounds and why the instructions assume the reader already knows how pound cake is mixed. The elaborate paper collar and the long slow bake suit a coal or wood range with uneven heat, where insulation did the work a thermostat does now. Fruitcake earned its place at weddings partly because it kept: made weeks in advance, fed with spirits, it survived the interval between baking and the day, and the top tier was often kept longer still, traditionally against a christening.