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Fruit Cake
Put two ounces each of flour and ground rice into a basin and mix with two ounces of butter; rub it with the fingers until well mixed with the flour, then put in one ounce each of chopped preserved cherries, ginger and candied citron-peel, four ounces of powdered sugar and a tablespoonful of blanched and powdered sweet almonds. Separate the yolks and whites of two eggs, beat the yolks first, mix them with the above ingredients, then beat the whites to a stiff froth and stir them in lightly at the last. Line a buttered cake-tin with sheets of buttered paper, pour the mixture in and bake it in a good oven; when cooked, remove the paper from the cake. Serve it cold.
This is a small, dense teacake in the English style rather than the towering dark fruitcake of Christmas — the whole thing rests on 4 oz of dry ingredients and two eggs. The whipped whites are the only lift it gets, so treat them carefully.
- The hinge: no leaveningThere is no baking powder or soda anywhere in the formula. The beaten whites are the sole aerating agent, so fold them in with a spatula in two or three additions and get the batter into the tin immediately.
- Ground riceGround rice is the close ancestor of modern rice flour, though it was generally milled a little coarser than today's fine white rice flour. It gives the short, slightly sandy crumb that distinguishes this cake from a plain sponge; substituting all wheat flour changes the texture entirely.
- Weights, not cupsTwo ounces each of flour and rice flour is about 1/2 cup and 1/3 cup respectively; 2 oz butter is half a stick; 4 oz of fine (caster) sugar is about 1/2 to 2/3 cup, though 4 oz of modern confectioners' sugar would measure nearer a cup. Use a scale — at this scale volume errors are proportionally large.
- Powdered sugarPowdered sugar here means sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar on shelves now. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match.
- "A good oven""A good oven" is not a temperature the book defines; a moderate oven, in the region of 350F, is a reasonable modern reading. In a small round tin expect roughly 35 to 45 minutes; test with a skewer at the centre.
- Buttered paperParchment does the job the buttered sheets did. Butter the tin, line base and sides, and butter the paper as well — the sugar ratio here is high and the edges will stick.
- Preserved cherries and gingerGlacé cherries and stem ginger in syrup, both patted dry and chopped, and candied citron peel if you can find it; mixed candied peel is the common stand-in. One ounce of each is about two tablespoons chopped.
- AlmondsBlanched and powdered sweet almonds means blanched almond flour, about a tablespoon. Bitter almonds were a distinct commercial article at the time and are not what is wanted here.
- YieldOne small cake, six to eight thin slices. It is served cold and keeps a day or two wrapped; the fruit keeps it from drying out quickly.
Oscar Tschirky's book gathers a great deal of English and continental household cookery alongside the Waldorf's own dishes, and this is squarely in the English tradition of small "rice cakes" enriched with candied fruit — ground rice was a standard pantry item in nineteenth-century Britain, valued for producing a fine, short crumb in cakes and puddings. The fruit here is the expensive kind: preserved cherries, stem ginger and citron peel were imported confectionery goods, and a cake using an ounce of each in a four-ounce batter was making a modest amount of flour carry a conspicuous amount of luxury. That the recipe leans on beaten whites rather than baking powder is a fair marker of its age; chemical leavening was widely available by the 1890s but older cake formulas built on egg foam persisted in print for decades, particularly in the smaller, richer teacakes meant to be sliced thin and served cold.