Election Cake
1/2 cup butter 8 finely chopped figs 1 cup bread dough 1¼ cups flour 1 egg 1/2 teaspoon soda 1 cup brown sugar 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1/2 cup sour milk ¼ teaspoon clove ⅔ cup raisins seeded, and ¼ teaspoon mace cut in pieces ¼ teaspoon nutmeg 1 teaspoon salt Work butter into dough, using the hand. Add egg well beaten, sugar, milk, fruit dredged with two tablespoons flour, and flour mixed and sifted with remaining ingredients .
Put into a well-buttered bread pan, cover, and let rise one and one-fourth hours. Bake one hour in a slow oven.
Cover with Boiled Milk Frosting. 1/4 cup of butter ½ cup sugar 1 egg
A yeast-raised fruit cake that borrows its leavening from a lump of ordinary bread dough, then hedges with a little soda. It behaves more like a sweet enriched bread than a modern butter cake.
- The bread doughOne cup of risen white bread dough, roughly 8 oz, taken at the point where it has doubled and is ready to shape. If you are not baking bread that day, mix a straight dough of about 1 1/4 cups flour, 1/2 cup water, 1 teaspoon yeast and 1/2 teaspoon salt and let it rise until doubled.
- Ambiguous quantitiesThe flour reads as 1 1/4 cups and the clove, mace and nutmeg as 1/4 teaspoon each; the printed figures have lost their fractions. Treat 1 1/4 cups flour as the intended amount, which with the dough gives a stiff batter rather than a pourable one.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured, acidic milk. Buttermilk is the direct substitute; failing that, add a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar to 1/2 cup whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. The acid is what activates the soda.
- Slow oven300 to 325F. An hour at that heat suits a dense, sugary, fruit-heavy loaf; hotter and the crust sets and colours long before the middle is done.
- Working the butter inButter is worked into the dough by hand, as for a brioche, and it will look broken and greasy before it comes together. Keep at it until the dough is smooth, or the fat will weep out during the rise.
- Dredging the fruitTossing the figs and raisins in two tablespoons of flour keeps them suspended instead of sinking to the base. The recipe does not say whether those two tablespoons come out of the 1 1/4 cups or are extra; taking them from the measured flour is the usual reading.
- The riseAn hour and a quarter is a guide, not a rule. The sugar and butter slow the yeast considerably; judge by the dough rising to within an inch of the pan rim.
- Pan and yieldA buttered loaf pan; the recipe says only 'bread pan'. The quantities suit a single small-to-standard loaf, and like other yeasted fruit cakes it is often said to improve on the second day.
- The frostingThe recipe directs you to a Boiled Milk Frosting given elsewhere. The butter, sugar and egg trailing at the end of the page may belong to that frosting or to the next recipe on the page. A plain confectioners' sugar glaze or a seven-minute icing serves the same purpose.
Election cake is a New England survival, generally traced to Hartford and to the day-long town gatherings at which freemen cast their votes and were fed at public or militia expense. Early versions were made in large quantity, which explains the yeast: before chemical leavening was common a large sweetened, fruited loaf was raised the way bread was raised, and a piece of the day's bread dough was the practical shortcut. In this version the civic occasion has faded and the cake has shrunk to a single loaf pan, with a half-teaspoon of soda added to help the sluggish, butter-laden dough along.