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White Fruit Cake
Take one cup of butter; two cups of sugar; two and one-half cups of flour; seven eggs (whites only); two teaspoons of baking powder; one pound of figs; one pound of dates; one pound of almonds; one pound of raisins; three-fourths pound of citron. Rub the butter and sugar to a cream. Chop the fruit rather coarse, keeping each variety separate from the others while chopping, and afterward mixing all lightly together with the fingers. Sift some of the flour over the fruit, place the powder in the rest of the flour, and sift the flour again to mix thoroughly. Then add the flour to the butter and sugar, stir in the fruit, and lastly add the beaten whites of the eggs. Bake slowly in two medium-sized tins for one and one-half hours. Line the tins with buttered paper.
A white fruit cake is a light-colored, egg-white-only batter carrying nearly five pounds of fruit and nuts — the batter is essentially mortar. A few points make the difference between a cake and a brick.
- The hinge: fruit to batterRoughly 4 3/4 lb of fruit and nuts against 2 1/2 cups of flour means the batter barely coats it. Do not be alarmed at how stiff the mixture is, and do not thin it — the fruit releases moisture as it bakes.
- "Bake slowly"The book gives no temperature; a slow oven is generally taken as somewhere in the region of 275-325F. At that heat and this density, 1 1/2 hours is a minimum; test with a skewer at the center and expect to go longer. If the tops color too fast, tent with foil.
- Pan size and lining"Two medium-sized tins" probably indicates deep loaf or round cake tins, perhaps in the range of 9x5 inches or 8 inches across, though the recipe does not say. Parchment will serve for the buttered paper: line base and sides, letting the paper stand above the rim.
- Egg whitesSeven whites is roughly a cup. They go in last, beaten stiff, and are better folded than stirred.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks around Christmas or from baking suppliers. It is not lemon peel, though candied lemon and orange peel are the usual substitute if citron is unavailable.
- AlmondsUse blanched almonds, chopped coarse, so the cake stays pale; skin-on almonds will speckle it.
- Chopping the fruit separatelyNot fussiness: figs and dates are sticky and will clump the raisins and citron into a mass if chopped together. Flouring the chopped fruit keeps it suspended rather than sinking.
- Yield and keepingAbout 6 lb of finished cake, two loaves, each cutting into 16 or more thin slices. Wrapped tightly, it improves over a week or two; brushing with brandy or syrup before wrapping is the traditional keeping method.
White fruit cake is the pale cousin of the dark Christmas or wedding cake — no molasses, no brown sugar, no spice, no egg yolks, and the fruit chosen for lightness: figs, dates, citron, blanched almonds and light raisins rather than currants and candied cherries. It belongs to a late-Victorian and Edwardian fashion for white cakes generally, a vogue often linked to the availability of reliable chemical baking powder and cheap refined sugar, though the connection is more surmise than documented fact. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book to the same audience of middle-class homemakers, and a cake like this — expensive in fruit, long in the oven, made in quantity and kept for weeks — is squarely a holiday or wedding production rather than everyday baking.