Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Bride Cakes
Bride Cakes
Beat some warmed butter to a cream, with sugar; then beat a dozen or so eggs, two at a time, and when all are in the batter, whisk for nearly an hour and stir in gradually a pound of sifted-flour, add a pound and a half each of raisins and currants, both chopped, quarter of a pound of pounded almonds, half a pound of candied peel minced very fine, and the grated rinds of an orange and a lemon, together with a gill of brandy. Pour this mixture into a tin lined with buttered-paper and bake until quite done. Turn upside down until quite cool, then apply icing and ornamentation.
A pound-cake framework scaled up into a proper English wedding fruitcake. The recipe assumes a professional pastry cook who already knows the proportions, so the two most important quantities are left out entirely.
- The missing quantitiesNo amount is given for butter or sugar. The dish belongs to the pound-cake family, where butter, sugar, flour and eggs are used in equal weights, so a pound each of butter and sugar against the stated pound of flour is the proportion the recipe implies. Treat that as an informed reading, not a stated figure.
- Weights and volumesA gill is half a cup, so a gill of brandy is 4 oz. A pound of sifted flour is roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups; weigh it rather than measuring by cup, since the whole structure depends on it. Eggs of the period were not graded as they are now and were often somewhat smaller, so a dozen may amount to slightly less than a dozen large eggs today.
- The hour of whiskingBeating for nearly an hour by hand is what aerated the batter before chemical leaveners were used in rich cakes. A stand mixer does the same work in 10 to 15 minutes on medium; the target is a pale, thick, visibly increased mass. Add the eggs two at a time as written or the emulsion will break.
- Oven heat"Bake until quite done" gives no temperature, and the recipe names neither an oven heat nor a tin size. For a cake this rich and dense the usual modern equivalent is a low oven, around 275-300F, with a baking time on the order of 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 hours for a large cake. Higher heat scorches the fruit and sugar long before the center sets.
- Lining the tinButtered paper means parchment today, and a cake baking this long wants a double thickness on the sides standing an inch above the rim, plus a collar of newspaper or a folded towel around the outside of the tin to slow the heat at the edges.
- Doneness and coolingA skewer should come out clean of batter, though it will pick up melted fruit. Inverting the cake until cold, as directed, keeps the top flat for icing and lets the crumb settle without collapsing; leave it in the tin for the first hour.
- Pounded almonds and candied peelPounded almonds are ground almonds, coarser than commercial almond flour. Candied peel of the period was generally sold as whole candied peel in slabs and minced by hand; it tends to be less sweet than the diced tub peel sold now, which is often finished with glucose syrup.
- KeepingThis is a keeping cake. Wrapped in cloth and paper and given an occasional spoonful of brandy over several weeks, it improves; iced the day it is baked, it tastes raw and boozy. The stated ingredients come to more than 8 lb of batter, so expect a finished cake somewhere around 7 to 8 lb, cutting into a great many thin wedding-cake slices.
"Bride cake" was the standard nineteenth-century name for what is now called wedding cake: a dark, brandy-soaked fruitcake under hard white royal icing, sturdy enough to be built into tiers and to survive the traditional practice of saving the top layer for a christening or an anniversary. The form descends from the older English plum cake, and its tiered white-iced presentation is usually traced to the elaborate royal wedding cakes of Victoria's reign. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, put his name to this book in 1896; the recipe's shorthand and its unstated butter and sugar suggest a reader assumed to know the proportions already.