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French Loaf Cake
Five cups sugar, three of butter, two of milk, ten of flour, six eggs, three nutmegs, pound seeded raisins, a grated lemon, small tea-spoon soda, wine-glass wine, one of brandy, or, two-thirds of a cup of Orleans molasses. - Mrs. A. S. Chapman.
A full-sized nineteenth-century loaf cake given as a bare list of quantities, with no method, pan or oven noted. Everything below is what the original assumes its reader already knows.
- Scale it down firstTen cups of flour, five of sugar and three of butter make something on the order of eight to nine pounds of batter, enough for about four large loaves. Quartering the recipe gives roughly one 9x5-inch loaf and is the sensible way to test it.
- The missing methodA loaf cake of this period is made by creaming the butter and sugar, beating in the eggs, then alternating the flour with the milk and liquor, with the fruit floured and folded in last. Nothing here is meant to be stirred all at once.
- Oven and timeBake at 325F. A dense fruited loaf of this size needs 1.5 to 2 hours for a full-size pan; cover the top with foil once it colours and test with a skewer to the centre.
- Wine-glassA wine-glass in American cookbooks of this era is about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. "One of brandy" means one wine-glass of brandy, not one cup.
- Orleans molassesNew Orleans molasses is a light-to-medium cane molasses, closer to modern unsulphured molasses than to blackstrap. It is offered here as an alternative to the wine and brandy, and it is also what gives the soda something acidic to work against.
- The soda problemA small teaspoon of soda in ten cups of flour needs acid to do anything. The molasses version supplies plenty; the wine-and-brandy version has only the modest acidity of a wine-glass of wine and the milk, so the cake leans largely on the six eggs and the creamed butter for lift -- beat them thoroughly and expect a close, heavy crumb by design.
- Three nutmegsThree whole nutmegs grated is roughly two to three tablespoons, assertive even across this quantity of batter. Grate fresh, and scale it with the rest of the recipe rather than by taste memory of ground nutmeg from a jar.
- Seeded raisins and grated lemon"Seeded" means the seeds were picked out by hand; modern seedless raisins go straight in. A grated lemon means the zest only, taken off before you reach the white pith.
Loaf cake was the workhorse of the American cake repertoire before layer cakes took over: a rich, spiced, fruited batter baked in a bread pan and kept in a crock for weeks, sliced thin for company or for tea. The "French" in the title is doing very little work beyond signalling refinement, a common nineteenth-century labelling habit; there is nothing especially French about the formula, which is stretched with milk and lifted slightly with soda. The Dixie Cook Book, like many compiled community cookbooks of the 1880s and after, credits a good number of its contributions to the women who supplied them, and Mrs. Chapman's entry has the terseness typical of a recipe written down for people who had already watched it made. The wine, brandy and nutmeg place it in the older English fruit-cake tradition, while the offered substitution of New Orleans molasses is a distinctly Southern economy: the same cake, sweetened and darkened with what was on the shelf.