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Pound Fruit Cake
The staple every day sort of plum cake. The fruit does not sink to the bottom in this mixture. 14 ounces of sugar. 14 ounces of butter. 11 eggs. 18 ounces of flour. Mix the above the same as pound cake, then add to it: 2 teaspoonfuls of mixed ground spices, cinnamon, mace, and alspice. 1 lemon, grated rind, and juice. 1 pound of raisins. 1 pound of currants. 8 ounces of citron. Half cupful of whisky (optional).
Use seedless raisins. Nothing is good made full of raisin seeds. Mix the fruit together and dust it with flour before stirring it into the batter. The cakes require from 1 to 1 1/2 hours to bake.
A bakery-scale fruit cake built on the pound cake method, which means no chemical leavening at all — the lift comes entirely from creamed butter and beaten egg. Everything below serves that fact.
- The hinge: creaming and egg emulsionWith no baking powder or soda, the only aeration is mechanical. Cream the butter and sugar until pale and visibly increased in volume, then add the eggs a little at a time so the batter never breaks; if it curdles, beat in a spoonful of the flour to bring it back.
- Weights, not cupsWork by scale as written: 14 oz sugar (2 cups), 14 oz butter (3 1/2 sticks), 18 oz flour (about 4 cups, but weigh it). Eleven eggs shelled comes to roughly 19 oz, which is about eleven modern large eggs.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A rich, heavily fruited pound batter wants 325F; anything hotter sets and browns the crust long before the centre is done.
- Pan size and timingOne to one and a half hours only makes sense in loaves or shallow pans, not a single deep cake. Divide the batter between three or four 9x5-inch loaf pans, lined with parchment, and test with a skewer at the hour mark; a single deep cake from this quantity will take considerably longer.
- Why the fruit is flouredDusting the 2 1/2 pounds of raisins, currants and citron with flour gives the pieces a dry, grippy surface so the stiff batter holds them in suspension — the point the headnote is making. Take the dusting flour from the 18 ounces rather than adding extra.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks by grocers of the period. Cut it into small dice yourself; pre-chopped supermarket "fruit cake mix" is often other candied fruit, dyed, and tastes of little.
- Mace and the spice mixTwo teaspoons of mixed spice across roughly six pounds of finished cake is a light hand by modern taste. Ground mace goes stale quickly — if yours has no smell, buy fresh or grate a little nutmeg in its place.
- Yield and keepingAbout six pounds of cake. It improves over a week or two wrapped closely; the optional half cup of whisky is there as much for keeping as for flavour, and a little more brushed over the cooled crust does no harm.
"Plum cake" in nineteenth-century usage has nothing to do with plums: plum had long meant raisin or dried fruit generally, a sense preserved in plum pudding, and by this period the name covered any butter cake loaded with raisins, currants and candied peel. What marks this version as a trade recipe rather than a household one is the shape of the ingredient list — even ounces of sugar and butter against eggs counted by the piece, the assumption that the reader already knows "the same as pound cake," and the complete absence of an oven temperature, because a baker judged his own oven. The aside about seedless raisins is a period detail worth noticing: seeded muscatels had to be stoned by hand, so a cook directed to seedless fruit was being spared a tedious job.