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White Raisin Cake
Like the preceding, with a pound of sultan seedless raisins instead of almonds, and flavor with lemon and extract of nutmegs. This is best baked in shallow pans in sheets; but of that more further on. And it is for these church fairs or other public festivals the dwellers in the world of private houses try to succeed and show their best, if ever, but they seem to always fail.
This is a variation, not a standalone formula: it assumes you have the preceding cake in front of you and are swapping the almonds for raisins. Read the recipe above this one first, since all the quantities of butter, sugar, flour and egg white come from there.
- What "like the preceding" meansThe preceding recipe is not reproduced here, so its ingredients and quantities must be taken from the page above; the title and the almond substitution point to a pale, egg-white batter. The instruction is simply to use a pound of raisins where the previous recipe used almonds, and change nothing else.
- Sultana raisins"Sultan seedless" is the sultana, a pale seedless raisin associated with Smyrna and the eastern Mediterranean; the nearest thing on shelves now is sold as golden raisins, though these are usually sulphured Thompson seedless. Ordinary dark raisins work but will bleed and muddy the pale crumb, which defeats the point of the cake.
- Extract of nutmegsA nutmeg flavouring extract sold in the period alongside lemon and almond extracts, and uncommon in shops now. Freshly grated nutmeg is the practical substitute; roughly half a teaspoon for a cake of this size, with lemon flavouring or grated lemon zest.
- Keep the fruit suspendedA pound of raisins in a soft white batter will sink. Toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in at the very end, and stop mixing as soon as they are distributed.
- Shallow pans in sheetsThe recipe says only that it is "best baked in shallow pans in sheets" and puts off the explanation ("of that more further on"). The usual reason is that a heavily fruited batter baked deep sets on the outside before the centre and the fruit settles toward the bottom. A half-sheet pan or two 9-inch square pans, batter no more than an inch deep, gives an even bake and clean squares for cutting.
- OvenThe recipe specifies no oven at all. For sheets of this depth a moderate oven of about 350F is the modern equivalent; expect roughly 20 to 30 minutes, and test with a skewer at the centre rather than by time, since the fruit holds moisture.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to Jessup Whitehead, a Chicago hotel cook and trade writer of the 1880s and 90s whose books were aimed squarely at professionals feeding hundreds, which is why so many of his cakes are built around a pound of this or that and baked in sheets rather than tins. The closing jab at "the dwellers in the world of private houses" is characteristic: Whitehead seems to have had an eye for the gap between home baking and volume work, and church fairs may well be where the two collided, since a home cook asked to produce cake for two hundred people suddenly faced a professional's problem with a domestic's equipment. Sultanas themselves — seedless, pale and imported dried from Smyrna and the eastern Mediterranean — made a genuinely white fruited cake possible, where earlier cooks had to stone and chop dark raisins by hand and accept the colour that came with them.