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English Fruit Cake
butter 1 lb. light brown sugar 9 eggs 1 lb. flour 2 teaspoons mace 2 teaspoons cinnamon 1 teaspoon soda. 2 tablespoons milk 3 lbs. currants 2 lbs. raisins, seeded and finely chopped 1/2 lb. almonds, blanched and shredded 1 lb. citron, thinly sliced and cut in strips Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and beat thoroughly. Separate yolks from whites of eggs; beat yolks until thick and lemon-colored, whites until stiff and dry, and add to first mixture. Then add milk, fruit, nuts, and flour mixed and sifted with mace, cinnamon, and soda. Put in buttered deep pans, cover with buttered paper, steam three hours, and bake one and one half hours in a slow oven, or bake four hours in a very slow oven. Rich fruit cake is always more satisfactory when done if the cooking is accomplished by steaming. 1 lb. butter Wedding Cake I 1/2 teaspoon clove 1 lb. sugar 12 eggs 1 lb. flour 2 teaspoons cinnamon
A full pound-cake base carrying roughly six pounds of dried fruit and nuts — a batter that cannot rise or set by ordinary baking alone, which is why it is steamed first and only finished in the oven.
- Steam first, bake secondThe three hours of steaming cooks the interior gently at 212F so the fruit-heavy batter sets without the edges scorching; the oven stage largely dries and colors the surface. The author allows a straight bake of four hours in a very slow oven as an alternative, but says the result is "more satisfactory" when steamed.
- Oven temperaturesA slow oven here is roughly 300-325F; a very slow oven, for the four-hour straight bake, roughly 250-275F. Both are low enough that the sugar and fruit will not caramelize before the middle is done.
- Pans and paperDeep pans means loaf or deep round tins, filled no more than three-quarters. Line them with buttered parchment rather than the plain buttered paper of the original, and set the covered pans on a rack in a large kettle with an inch or two of simmering water, adding boiling water as it evaporates.
- Missing quantitiesThe spice and leavening amounts as printed are incomplete: mace and soda are called for in the method but never quantified. Any figure you settle on — a teaspoon of each is a reasonable starting point for a batter this size — is your estimate, not the author's.
- Currants and raisinsCurrants means dried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. Seeded raisins meant removing the pips by hand from muscatels; modern seedless raisins need only chopping. Rinse and dry very old-style currants, which often arrive dusty.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks or diced form around the winter holidays. A pound is a large amount by current taste; mixed candied peel or additional raisins can stand in without upsetting the balance of the batter.
- Twelve eggs, separatedThe stiffly beaten whites supply much of the lift, alongside the soda and the air worked into the creamed butter and sugar. Fold them in rather than beating them down, and add the flour and fruit last, as the method directs, so the batter is not overworked.
- Yield and keepingThe ingredients come to something on the order of eleven pounds of batter, rather less once cooked — enough for several loaves. Wrapped closely and stored cool, it improves over weeks; this is a cake meant to be made well ahead.
Fannie Farmer places this beside her wedding cake, and the two are near relations: in nineteenth-century American practice the dark, spice-laden, fruit-crammed cake known as English or bride's cake was the ceremonial cake, made in quantity weeks in advance and often sent home with guests in small boxes. Its ancestry runs back through the British plum cake, itself descended from boiled and steamed puddings, which is the tradition the instruction to steam a cake belongs to. The scale, too, is a period marker: three pounds of currants and a pound of butter belonged to a household that baked for a crowd and expected the result to keep through a season.