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Election Cake
Make the Scotch seed cake but with 1 pound of seeded or seedless raisins and half cupful of brandy and flavorings, and omit the carraway seeds.
This is a variation, not a standalone formula: it sends you back to the book's Scotch seed cake and tells you what to swap. Read both together before you start.
- You need the base recipe firstScale the Scotch seed cake in full, then make three changes: 1 lb raisins in place of the caraway, half a cup of brandy added to the liquid, and whatever spice or extract you are using for "flavorings." Nothing else changes.
- "Seeded" raisinsSeeded means the seeds have been removed, not that they are present; the recipe treats seeded and seedless as interchangeable here. Ordinary dark seedless raisins are the direct modern equivalent. One pound is roughly 3 cups.
- "Flavorings" means spicePeriod election cake recipes commonly use nutmeg and mace, sometimes with cinnamon and a little lemon or rose extract; the recipe itself leaves the choice open. A teaspoon of nutmeg and half a teaspoon of mace per pound of flour would be in keeping.
- The brandy is extra liquidHalf a cup added to a batter already balanced for milk or water will loosen it noticeably. Either hold back an equal amount of the base recipe's liquid, or accept a slacker batter and a longer bake.
- Keep the fruit from sinkingToss the raisins with a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in at the very end. A brandy-loosened batter has less body to hold a pound of fruit in suspension.
- OvenNo oven heat is given here; follow the base recipe. A rich fruited loaf of this kind suits 325-350F. A 9x5 loaf runs 1 to 1 1/2 hours; test with a skewer in the center, and tent the top with foil if it colors before the middle sets.
- Yield and keepingYield depends on the Scotch seed cake batter you are scaling; expect one large loaf or two small ones. It slices better on the second day, and the brandy should help it keep several days wrapped tightly at room temperature.
Election cake belongs to New England, where town meeting and election days brought voters in from outlying farms and the household baked a large fruited, yeast-raised loaf to feed them. It is one of the earliest named American cakes in print, appearing in Amelia Simmons's American Cookery of 1796, and the Hartford version was still being sold by Connecticut bakers into the twentieth century. The original was a sweetened bread dough, worked with butter, sugar, fruit and spirit and set to rise overnight; by the time this entry recorded it, the name had drifted onto a butter cake that shared only the fruit, the brandy and the spicing. That drift is the interesting part of this entry: the author does not bother with a formula at all, directing the baker instead to a seed cake batter turned into an election cake with a pound of raisins and a change of flavoring.