Currant Cake
½ cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 eggs Yolk 1 egg 1/2 cup milk 2 cups flour. 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup currants mixed with 1 tablespoon flour Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and eggs and egg yolk well beaten. Then add milk, flour mixed and sifted with baking powder, and currants. Bake forty minutes in buttered and floured cake pan. ¼ lb. butter 1/2 lb. sugar ½ cup milk 3 eggs
A plain butter cake from the creaming method, with dried currants tossed in flour so they stay suspended in the batter. The proportions are the familiar one-two-three cake framework, so it is forgiving as long as the fat and sugar are properly creamed.
- Butter quantityThe workable amount for 2 cups of flour and 1 cup of sugar is 1/2 cup butter (4 oz). A cup and a half of butter against two cups of flour would give far more fat than the flour can carry, so the leading figure is most likely a misprint for a half cup.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants — small dried grapes, not the fresh red or black currant berry. Fresh currants would wet the batter and are not interchangeable. Rinse and dry the dried fruit if it is dusty, then toss with the tablespoon of flour as directed to keep it from sinking.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, as was normal when ranges had no thermometers. Bake at 350F; forty minutes suits an 8-inch square or 9x5-inch loaf pan, and a skewer should come out clean.
- Pan and preparation"Buttered and floured cake pan" means exactly that — grease, then dust with flour and knock out the excess. Parchment in the base of a loaf pan makes removal easier without changing the result.
- EggsTwo whole eggs plus one yolk gives a richer, closer crumb than three whole eggs. Beat them well before adding, and add in two or three portions to keep the creamed butter from breaking.
- Mixing orderAdd the milk and the sifted flour-and-baking-powder alternately rather than all at once, finishing with flour. Stop as soon as the flour disappears; the baking powder does the lifting and overworked batter turns tough.
- YieldAbout one 8-inch square or a single loaf, roughly 10 to 12 slices. It keeps three or four days well wrapped and is better on the second day.
Currant cake belonged to the everyday end of the American cake repertoire — no frosting, no filling, sturdy enough to slice for tea or a lunch pail. Cake chapters of the period are often organised around this kind of variation: one basic creamed butter batter, then fruit, spice or flavouring stirred through it, so a cook who learned the proportions once could produce a dozen different cakes. The currants themselves are dried Zante grapes, imported and shelf-stable, which made them a staple of the late nineteenth-century pantry in a way fresh fruit could not be; recipes of the period lean heavily on raisins, currants and citron for exactly that reason. Baking powder, still relatively new as a commercial product, is what allows the cake to rise in forty minutes without the long beating that earlier cookbooks demanded.