Turkish Cake
Fine chocolate cake with figs, almonds and raisins. The snow cake mixture will not bear up the fruit. Make the lady cake mixture, and add to it 4 ounces of chocolate melted by heat in a cup. Then prepare 8 ounces of chopped figs. 8 ounces of almonds blanched and split. 8 ounces of seedless raisins. Flavor the prepared cake batter with vanilla and a little brandy. Dust the fruit with flour and stir it in.
What makes us think the ladies cannot make delicate cakes, for sure, just when they want them is the exhibition they sometimes make at a church fair where everybody contributes cake with their names on. They look awful--like a cake hospital.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone formula: it assumes you already have Whitehead's lady cake batter in front of you and tells you only what to change. A few things need translating.
- You need the base recipe first"Lady cake mixture" is a white butter cake — creamed butter and sugar, beaten egg whites, flour, and usually a little almond flavoring. Any modern white butter cake made with whipped whites will stand in, provided it is a stiff creamed batter and not a thin one.
- Why not snow cakeHis warning is the hinge of the recipe. A snow cake batter is presumably looser and more foam-dependent, so a pound and a half of heavy fruit sinks straight through it. Use the stiffest white batter you have, and expect a dense crumb rather than a light one.
- Scale the batter to the fruitTwenty-four ounces of fruit and nuts plus four ounces of chocolate is a great deal of addition. Figure a lady cake batter built on at least a pound of flour, or the cake will be fruit held together by suggestion.
- "Fine chocolate" in 1894The chocolate -- read this as unsweetened baking chocolate, not chips or couverture. Four ounces melted over hot water; let it cool to barely warm before it goes into the creamed butter or it will slacken the batter.
- Dusting the fruitToss the figs, almonds and raisins in a couple of tablespoons of the measured flour, not extra flour, so the cake does not come out dry. The coating is what keeps them suspended.
- Almonds "blanched and split"Whole almonds dropped in boiling water for a minute, skins slipped off, then halved along the natural seam with a knife. Slivered almonds from a bag are close enough, though they toast darker in a long bake.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives neither. A heavy fruited cake of this size will want a slow oven — roughly 300 to 325F — and something on the order of an hour and a quarter to an hour and three-quarters in a deep tin. At a hotter temperature the outside risks setting before the middle.
- YieldAs written this should fill roughly a 9- or 10-inch tube pan or two 8-inch loaves, and cuts thin. Cakes this heavily fruited generally keep well wrapped.
Nineteenth-century American bake shops sold a family of cakes named after places they had little to do with — Turkish, Spanish, Neapolitan, Genoa — the names often attaching to dried fruit, nuts and spice rather than to any actual foreign origin. Here it seems to mark the figs and almonds. Jessup Whitehead wrote for working hotel and restaurant pastry cooks, which is why the entry is a set of instructions for altering a batter he has already given rather than a complete recipe, and why it ends in a swipe at amateur church-fair baking; his books are full of that professional impatience, and the digressions are half the reason people still read them.