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Cincinnati Cake
Pour over one pound fat salt pork, chopped fine and free from lean and rind, one pint boiling water, let stand until nearly cold; add two cups brown sugar, one of molasses, one table-spoon each of cloves and nutmeg, and two of cinnamon, two pounds raisins, fourth pound citron, half glass brandy, three tea-spoons of baking powder, and seven cups of sifted flour. Bake slowly two and a half hours. This is excellent, and requires neither butter or eggs. -Mrs. G. E. Kinney.
A fruitcake built on rendered salt pork instead of butter and eggs. It works, but it depends entirely on the pork being pure fat and finely minced, and on a genuinely slow oven.
- "Bake slowly"The book gives no temperature; a modern slow oven of about 300F, and not above 325F, suits it. Much hotter and the outside sets and browns long before the dense, sugar-heavy center is done, and the fat weeps out.
- The porkUse fatback or the fattiest salt pork you can find, with every trace of lean and rind cut away — lean muscle will cook into hard grey threads through the cake. Salt pork sold today may carry more lean than the recipe assumes, so buy more than a pound and trim to weight.
- Chop it finer than you thinkThis is the hinge. The pieces should be very fine, roughly the size of coarse breadcrumbs, so the boiling water can soften them and the fat can disperse. Freeze the pork for twenty minutes first and it will chop cleanly; a food processor pulsed briefly does it faster.
- SaltA pound of salt pork carries a great deal of salt, and there is none added elsewhere. If yours is heavily cured, rinse and pat it dry before chopping, or the cake will taste seasoned rather than sweet.
- Order of mixingThe water is poured over the pork and left until nearly cold for a reason: added to a still-hot mixture, the baking powder would spend itself before the cake reached the oven. Stir the baking powder into the flour before it goes in, and add the flour last.
- SpicesA tablespoon each of cloves and nutmeg is aggressive by current taste, though not out of line for a fruitcake of this size. If you want it milder, a rounded teaspoon of cloves is closer to modern taste.
- Brandy"Half glass" is imprecise. In cake recipes of this period a wine glass runs about 2 fl oz, so roughly 2 tablespoons.
- Pans and yieldSeven cups of flour, two pounds of raisins and the rest make a very large quantity of batter; divide it between several loaf pans or a large tube pan and do not fill them more than two-thirds. Line with parchment, since there is enough sugar and molasses to weld the cake to bare metal.
- Doneness and keepingA skewer will come out sticky from the fruit; look instead for the cake pulling from the sides and springing back. Like all pork cakes it improves after several days wrapped tightly, and will keep for weeks.
Pork cake was a common item in American household baking through the nineteenth century, for the plain reason that salt pork kept in the cellar all year while butter was seasonal and eggs were not always to be had. Boiling water poured over minced fatback softens it into something that behaves in a batter much as creamed butter does, and the spices, molasses and two pounds of fruit cover any suggestion of the pig. Cincinnati was the pork-packing capital of the country from the 1830s onward and was known as Porkopolis. The book itself was assembled in the 1880s from the same body of contributed receipts that produced the Ohio collection Buckeye Cookery, which is why a signed Midwestern recipe like Mrs. Kinney's sits comfortably in a Southern volume.