Raisin Cake
Use one large cup of butter; one cup of milk; five eggs; one nutmeg; two cups of sugar; four cups of flour; one gill of brandy; one-half teaspoon of soda; one quart of boiled raisins. Put the raisins in a small stewpan and cover them with cold water. Cook them slowly for one-half hour, then drain and cool them. Beat the butter to a cream and beat the sugar into it; add the brandy and nutmeg, and beat a little longer. Add the yolks of the eggs, well beaten. Dissolve the soda in the milk, and add this to the beaten ingredients. Now add the flour. Stir in the well-beaten whites of the eggs. Spread the batter in thin layers in two large cake-pans, and sprinkle raisins upon each layer. Continue this until all the materials are used. Bake for two hours in a moderate oven. oven. This cake keeps well.
A pound-cake-style batter, heavy with fruit and spirits, built up in alternating strata of batter and raisins rather than mixed through. A few of the measurements need translating before you start.
- The gillOne gill is half a cup, so 4 fl oz of brandy. It is doing as much work as flavouring here as the nutmeg does, and there is no substitute that keeps the same character; grape juice will read as sweet rather than warm.
- "One large cup of butter"Genuinely imprecise. A level cup is 8 oz; "large" here probably indicates a generously filled rather than a level cup, so perhaps 8 to 9 oz. Weigh 8 oz and you will not go wrong.
- A quart of raisinsMeasured by volume, not weight: roughly 1 lb 4 oz of raisins. Modern raisins are generally softer and moister than commercially dried fruit of a century or more ago, so the half-hour simmer is likely more about plumping and cooling than rescuing something leathery. Drain them thoroughly and pat dry or the wet fruit will streak the batter.
- One nutmegA whole nutmeg grates to about 2 to 3 teaspoons. That is assertive by current taste; a teaspoon and a half gives a cake that still tastes of nutmeg without tasting only of it.
- The sodaHalf a teaspoon of soda with no acid in the batter beyond milk is a token amount. The lift comes almost entirely from the creamed butter and the beaten whites, so beat the whites to soft, not stiff, peaks and fold rather than stir.
- Moderate oven350F. Two hours at that heat is a long bake even for a rich cake, so check at 75 minutes with a skewer and tent the tops with foil once they colour. If your pans are shallow, the cake will be done well before the stated time.
- "Thin layers in two large cake-pans"This is not a layer cake. You are alternating batter and raisins in two deep pans so the fruit is suspended in bands instead of sinking; 9-inch round pans at least 3 inches deep, or two loaf tins, both lined.
- Yield and keepingTwo large cakes, about 24 servings. It does keep well, as promised: the brandy and the fruit make it better after a day or two, wrapped closely in paper and stored in a tin.
Raisin cake of this kind sits at the end of a long line of English-American rich cakes, kin to pound cake and fruitcake: creamed butter, whole eggs separated, spirits, and dried fruit in quantity, all baked slowly and expected to last. The Butterick Publishing Company was a pattern and fashion house before it was a cookbook publisher, and its recipe collections were pitched at the same middle-class household its dress patterns were. The instructions assume a cook who can judge a moderate oven but wants to be told exactly how to keep the fruit from sinking. Boiling and cooling the raisins appears in some nineteenth-century receipts, though flouring the fruit was the more usual anti-sinking instruction; the boiling is usually explained on two grounds: it softened fruit that had been dried hard for storage, and a cooled, drained raisin was less likely to drop through the batter. Brandy in the batter of a keeping cake was ordinary rather than luxurious, valued partly for what it did to the crumb over the following week.