Home › Cake-Making › Aunt Hettie's Loaf Cake
Aunt Hettie's Loaf Cake
Two cups sugar and one of butter beaten to a cream, three eggs, the whites beaten separately, three cups flour with one tea-spoon cream tartar stirred in, yolks of the eggs stirred well with the sugar and butter; now add two cups more flour with one tea-spoon cream tartar, one cup sweet milk and the whites of the eggs, and then stir again; add one nutmeg, one pound raisins or currants dredged with flour, one tea-spoon soda dissolved in four table-spoons of water. This makes two nice loaves, and is excellent.
A plain butter-and-raisin loaf leavened with cream of tartar and soda in the old two-part fashion. Everything here is workable in a modern kitchen once you fix the oven temperature and the pan size, neither of which the original bothers to give.
- Get it into the oven promptlyThe soda dissolved in water goes in last and begins reacting with the cream of tartar immediately. Have the pans greased and the oven up to heat before you add it, and bake without delay; this is not a batter that improves by standing.
- Oven and timeThe original gives no oven temperature or pan size. 350F is a reasonable modern choice; two loaves in 9x5-inch pans will take roughly 55 to 70 minutes; test with a skewer at the centre, and tent with foil if the tops colour early.
- The leaveningTwo teaspoons cream of tartar total (one with each addition of flour) against one teaspoon soda. That is a homemade baking powder in correct proportion, so do not substitute commercial baking powder on top of it.
- Quantities in modern termsOne cup butter is two sticks, 8 oz. Five cups flour is the total across both additions, about 600 g if you weigh; spoon it into the cup rather than scooping, as period flour was likely finer and lighter-packing than modern all-purpose.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabbered milk used in soda recipes. Whole milk is the closest match.
- One nutmegA whole grated nutmeg is roughly two to three teaspoons, which is assertive by current taste. Half that gives a cleaner flavour if you are not after the old-fashioned heavily spiced loaf.
- SaltNo salt is called for, likely because butter of the period was commonly salted. If you use unsalted butter, add half a teaspoon with the flour.
- Dredging the fruitTossing the pound of raisins or currants in flour is meant to keep them suspended rather than sinking. In the original they go in after the whites and second flour addition have been stirred through, so add them gently at that point rather than beating the batter down.
- YieldTwo loaves, as the recipe states. They keep well wrapped for several days.
Loaf cake in American cookery of this period means a rich fruited butter cake baked in a bread pan, related to older yeast-raised loaf cakes. By the time The Dixie Cook Book was compiled in the 1880s, chemical leavening of the kind seen here had largely displaced yeast in such receipts; packaged baking powder was commercially available by then but home-mixed cream of tartar and soda remained common. Keeping the acid in the flour and dissolving the alkali separately at the last moment, as here, is a familiar nineteenth-century arrangement for holding the two apart until the batter was ready. The attribution to Aunt Hettie is typical of community-sourced collections, and the closing verdict, "excellent," stands in for any further instruction.