Prune Cake
One cup sugar, half cup butter; cream butter and sugar, add three eggs beaten, use white of one for icing. Then add cup of milk, one and one-half cups of flour with two teaspoonfuls baking powder and a good pinch of salt sifted three times.
Add above alternately. Stone a goodsized cup of stewed prunes and add half a cup of seeded raisins, one-fourth teaspoonful each of cloves and allspices, also half a teaspoonful of cinnamon and nutmeg. Bake in layers and use white icing. This has been tried and proved to be an excellent dark cake.
A butter layer cake darkened with stewed prunes and spice, of the kind that filled the "dark cake" slot in a two-cake tea table. The original gives no pan size, oven heat or baking time, so those need filling in.
- Oven and panTwo 8-inch round layer pans, greased and floured, at 350F. Layers of this thickness are done in 20 to 25 minutes, when the top springs back and a tester comes out clean.
- The flour looks lightOne and a half cups of flour against a cup of milk, a cup of sugar and three eggs gives a distinctly loose batter, and the cup of prunes and half cup of raisins will sink in it. Period cup measures were not standardised and may not match the modern 8 fl oz, and a soft or pastry flour was likely; if you want the fruit suspended, take the flour up toward two cups and toss the fruit with a spoonful of it before folding in.
- Stewed prunesPrunes of this period came dried with the stones in and were simmered in water until plump, then pitted, which is why the recipe says to stone them. Modern pitted prunes need only 10 minutes in barely simmering water; drain them well, or the extra liquid loosens the batter further. Chop them roughly rather than leaving them whole.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" means the seeds have been removed, not that they are still in. Ordinary dark seedless raisins are the direct substitute.
- Add above alternatelyThis means the milk and the sifted dry ingredients go into the creamed butter in alternating additions, beginning and ending with the flour. Repeated sifting helped distribute the baking powder and lighten the flour; one thorough whisking does much the same job now.
- SpicesA quarter teaspoon each of cloves and allspice, half a teaspoon each of cinnamon and nutmeg. Grate the nutmeg fresh if you can; pre-ground loses most of its point within months.
- The reserved whiteOne egg white is held back for the icing, so only two whole eggs and one yolk go into the batter. A single white will make a boiled icing (syrup cooked to 240F beaten into the beaten white) sufficient for the top and middle of an 8-inch cake, but not a generous coating of the sides. The recipe does not say which white icing is meant; if you use an uncooked white-and-sugar version, note that it leaves the egg raw, so use a cooked or meringue-powder version if that is a concern.
- YieldOne two-layer 8-inch cake, 10 to 12 slices. It keeps better than a plain butter cake because of the fruit, and the spice improves on the second day.
Prunes were one of the great cheap sweeteners of the American pantry from roughly the late nineteenth century through the Second World War, when California orchards around Santa Clara and the Sacramento Valley were drying plums by the trainload. Cookbooks of the period put them into cakes, puddings, whips and pies, partly for economy and partly because the dark fruit and the clove-allspice-cinnamon-nutmeg quartet gave a passable imitation of an expensive fruitcake without candied peel or brandy. That is the role this cake plays: a hostess of the era was often said to set out a light cake and a dark cake together, and a spiced prune layer cake under white icing filled the dark half at very little cost. The closing line, "this has been tried and proved," reads as a vouching formula of the kind common in recipe collections of the period.