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Martha Washington Fruit Cake
½ pound butter or shortening
¼ teaspoon mace
1½ pounds sugar
2 cups sour cream
6 eggs
1 pound chopped raisins
1¾ pounds flour
1 pound well-cleaned currants
1 teaspoon soda
½ pound sliced citron
¼ teaspoon salt
Juice and rind of I lemon
I grated nutmeg
Cream the butter or shortening and add the sugar. Gradually add the well-beaten egg-yolks. Mix and sift the dry ingredients and add alternately with the cream. Add the raisins, currants, citron well floured, and lemon. Mix well. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg-whites. Turn into paper-lined loaf-cake pans and cover the tops with greased paper. Bake slowly at 320° F., about two and one-half hours.
A big, old-fashioned pound-cake-style fruit cake leavened with soda and sour cream rather than a long yeast rise. The measurements are by weight, and the quantities are larger than most modern loaf pans expect.
- Scale and yieldThe batter weighs close to eight pounds. Divide it between three 9x5-inch loaf pans, or two large ones plus a small tin; a single pan will not bake through even in two and a half hours.
- Weights to volume1¾ lb flour is roughly 6 cups, 1½ lb sugar roughly 3⅓ cups, and ½ lb butter is two sticks. Weighing is more reliable here than scooping, given how much flour is involved.
- One grated nutmegA whole nutmeg grated fine yields roughly 2 to 3 teaspoons. That is a great deal of nutmeg by modern taste; reduce it if you want the fruit forward instead.
- Sour cream and sodaThe soda is there to react with the acid in the cream, so the two go in together as directed. If the batter seizes up stiff, thin it with a few tablespoons of buttermilk rather than adding water.
- 320 degrees is deliberate320 degrees -- The original gives a number outright. A cake this dense at this size needs the low heat for the full two and a half hours; raising it to 350 risks setting the crust before the centre cooks.
- Flouring the fruitToss the raisins, currants and citron with a few spoonfuls of the measured flour before folding them in, as the recipe directs; it helps keep the fruit from sinking during the long slow bake.
- PapersLine the pans with parchment and lay greased parchment loosely over the tops for the first two hours, then remove it so the surface can colour. Foil works for the cover but do not press it down onto the batter.
- Doneness and keepingA skewer in the centre should come out clean and the cake should have pulled slightly from the paper; internal temperature around 205°F is a surer test. Cool completely in the pans, then wrap well — the flavour is markedly better after three or four days.
Cakes bearing Martha Washington's name multiplied in American cookbooks from the late nineteenth century onward, part of a broad Colonial Revival taste for attaching Mount Vernon to anything rich and celebratory. The association is traditionally traced to the "Great Cake" made in the Washington household, a fruit cake calling for something like forty eggs and pounds of butter and dried fruit — nothing like this recipe, which is a chemically leavened loaf with soda and sour cream doing the lifting. What Butterick is really selling is the name: a fruit cake a home cook could manage in an afternoon, with the prestige of a historical pedigree it does not actually have. The citron, currants and whole grated nutmeg are the genuinely old-fashioned parts, all of them imported goods long established in festive English and American baking.