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Southern Loaf Cake
Three cups of light dough; three cups sugar; one cup butter; and three eggs beaten separately. Add the beaten yolks to the butter and sugar when well creamed, and pour in one-third cup of sweet milk with one-half teaspoon of soda dissolved in it. Add a little more flour, then stir in one cup of seeded raisins well dredged with flour and bake in a steady, hot oven.
This is a yeast-raised cake of the old school, built on a piece of risen bread dough rather than on baking powder. The instructions assume knowledge a 1911 cook had and a modern one does not, so several steps have to be filled in.
- "Light dough" is risen bread doughIt means plain white bread dough that has gone through its first rise and is puffy and slack. Three cups is roughly 1 1/2 lb of dough; a batch made from about 3 cups of flour, or a portion held back from a loaf you are already baking.
- The hinge: the dough must be worked in completelyThe creamed butter, sugar, yolks and milk are beaten into the dough, not folded around it. Use a stand mixer with the paddle, or your hands, and keep going until there are no ropes or streaks of plain dough left. Undermixed batter bakes into a cake with tough bready seams.
- The whites are the missing instructionThe eggs are "beaten separately" and only the yolks are ever accounted for. Beat the three whites to soft peaks and fold them in at the end, after the raisins.
- Soda in sweet milkHalf a teaspoon of baking soda is not there to leaven on its own; it neutralises the acidity the fermented dough has developed and gives a little lift. "Sweet milk" simply means fresh milk, as opposed to sour or buttermilk.
- "A little more flour" is genuinely vagueThe original gives no quantity. Add flour a tablespoon at a time only until the batter holds together as a thick, sticky dough-batter that drops heavily from the spoon; too much and the cake bakes dry and coarse.
- It needs a second riseNo proofing time is stated because it was assumed. Turn the mixture into greased loaf pans, filling them no more than two-thirds, cover, and leave in a warm place until visibly risen and domed, roughly an hour to an hour and a half depending on kitchen warmth.
- "A steady, hot oven"In period usage a "hot" oven usually meant something nearer 400-425F, but a rich, sugary fruited batter will colour and scorch long before the centre sets, so a steadier 350F is the safer modern reading. Tent with foil if the top darkens before the middle is done.
- Dredging the raisinsTossing the seeded raisins in flour before stirring them in keeps them suspended rather than sinking to the bottom. Seeded raisins in period usage are large raisins with the seeds removed; ordinary dark raisins are the equivalent.
- Yield and timingEnough for two standard 9x5 loaves. Bake about 45 to 60 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean and the internal temperature reaches roughly 200F. The cake keeps well and slices best the day after baking.
Loaf cake of this kind is the direct descendant of the yeast-raised, fruit-studded cakes that dominated American baking before chemical leaveners were cheap and reliable, the family that includes New England election cake and the various "rusk" and "raised" cakes that fill nineteenth-century manuscript books. The economy of it is the point: a cook already had bread dough working on the back of the stove, and enriching a few cups of it with butter, sugar, eggs and raisins turned a workday staple into something for company. By the time the Butterick book appeared in the early twentieth century, baking powder had largely displaced this method, and the recipe's survival under a regional name may mean it was carried along as a household inheritance rather than kept current.