Wedding Cake II
1 lb. butter 1 lb. flour 1 1/2 teaspoons mace brown sugar 12 eggs 1 cup molasses 1 lb. 4 teaspoons cinnamon 4 teaspoons allspice 1/2 teaspoons mace 1 nutmeg, grated ¼ teaspoon soda 3 lbs. raisins, seeded and cut in pieces 2 lbs. Sultana raisins 1/2 lbs. citron, thinly sliced and cut in strips 1 lb. currants 1½ preserved lemon rind 1½ preserved orange rind 1 cup brandy 4 squares chocolate, melted 1 tablespoon hot water Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and beat thoroughly. Separate yolks from whites of eggs, and beat yolks until thick and lemon-colored. Add to first mixture, then add flour (excepting one-third cup, which should be reserved to dredge fruit), mixed and sifted with spices, fruit dredged with flour, lemon rind and orange rind finely chopped, brandy. chocolate, and whites of eggs beaten until stiff and dry. Just before putting into pans, add soda dissolved in hot water. Cover pans with buttered paper, and steam four hours. Finish cooking by leaving in a warm oven over night. 1½ lb. butter 1/2 lb. sugar Yolks 5 eggs Whites 5 eggs Grated rind 1/2 lemon 2 teaspoons lemon juice
This is a dark, spiced fruit cake of the old English wedding-cake type, and the printed ingredient list has come down to us in disarray — the butter, sugar and egg block appears at the end, and the flour is missing entirely. Read the whole thing before committing, and expect to work from a modern fruitcake formula for the batter proportions.
- The flour is not givenThe method calls for flour "excepting one-third cup, which should be reserved to dredge fruit," but no quantity appears anywhere in the text. Without it the recipe cannot be scaled as printed; use the flour weight from a comparable rich fruitcake, roughly equal to the butter.
- Butter, sugar and eggs look out of proportionAs printed, 1½ lb butter and ½ lb sugar with five eggs must carry something over 7 lb of fruit. Rich cakes of this size are usually built on much larger egg and sugar quantities, so the block may well be truncated or misprinted.
- Ambiguous amounts"1½ preserved lemon rind" and "1½ preserved orange rind" appear to mean the candied rind of that many fruits, though the figures may themselves be misprints; ½ is an equally plausible reading. The quarter teaspoon of soda is what the printed page gives, and suits a cake leavened chiefly by beaten whites.
- Squares of chocolateA square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so four squares is 4 oz. Not cocoa, and not sweetened; substituting semisweet will throw the sugar off.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" means the seeds have been removed, a job now done for you. Any large dark raisin works; Sultanas are golden raisins.
- The steamingLine the pans, then cover with buttered parchment tied down, and set them on a rack above simmering water in a covered pot. Four hours is genuine — check the water level hourly and top up with boiling water so the pot never runs dry.
- "A warm oven over night"This presumably means the residual heat of a cooling range; the book gives no temperature. A modern oven will not hold so low a heat reliably, so the practical approach is to finish the cake at the lowest setting your oven will hold until a skewer comes out clean, an hour or two depending on pan depth.
- Ripening and yieldThe cup of brandy is preservative as much as flavour. Wrapped in brandy-dampened cloth and kept airtight in a cool place, this cake improves for weeks. The fruit alone runs to about 7½ lb, so expect two large loaves or a tiered set of pans, and slices cut very thin.
Nineteenth-century American weddings often had two cakes: a pale "bride's cake" leavened with beaten whites, and a dark, heavily fruited and spiced cake — this one — that could be baked well in advance, soaked in spirits, boxed and sent home with the guests. The type descends from the English rich fruit or plum cake, and steaming rather than baking suits a batter so dense with fruit that it would scorch long before the centre set. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book prints more than one wedding cake, this being the second.