Home › Cake-Making › Fruit Cake (One pound brown sugar one)
Fruit Cake (One pound brown sugar one)
One pound brown sugar, one of butter, one of eggs, one of flour, two of raisins, two of currants, half pound citron, a nutmeg, tablespoon cloves, one of allspice, half pint brandy, and two tea-spoons baking-powder. After baking, while yet warm, pour over cake a half pint wine. This makes the cake delicious. - Miss Angie Skinner, Somerset.
A pound-weight fruit cake of the old school: everything measured on the scale, nothing measured in cups, and no baking time given at all. The weights are the recipe, so work from a scale rather than converting.
- A pound of eggsWeigh, do not count. A pound of eggs out of the shell is roughly 9 large eggs; buying about 1 lb 2 oz of eggs in shell gets you there. This is the only ingredient where guessing will change the crumb.
- What the weights come toOne pound each of sugar, butter, eggs and flour, plus four and a half pounds of dried fruit and citron, gives roughly 9 lb of batter. Divide it between two 9-inch or three 8-inch deep tins, lined with a double thickness of parchment.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the cook was judging her stove. Bake slow -- 300F -- for a cake this dense and sugary; a hotter oven scorches the outside long before the centre sets. Expect 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 hours depending on tin size, and test with a skewer.
- Baking-powder in 1880s termsTwo teaspoons for a pound of flour is modest, and period baking-powder was single-acting and less consistent in strength than today's double-acting product. Use two level teaspoons and no more; the eggs and the creamed butter are doing most of the lifting.
- The nutmegOne whole nutmeg, grated, is about two teaspoons -- a real quantity, not a pinch. Grate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg at that volume tastes flat and dusty.
- Currants and raisinsCurrants here means dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. Both fruits and the citron should be tossed with a spoonful of the weighed flour before folding in, or they sink.
- The half pint of brandyA US half pint is one cup. It goes into the batter; much of the alcohol cooks off, but the cake stays assertively boozy.
- The wine soakingPour the second cup of wine over the cake while still warm and in the tin, so it absorbs rather than runs off. Sherry, madeira or a sweet port suits the spicing. Then wrap in parchment and foil and keep it at least a week -- these cakes are better at a month than on the day.
- CreamingA pound of butter and a pound of brown sugar need long beating before the eggs go in, added a few at a time. Curdled batter here means a heavy, greasy cake, and there is too much fruit for it to recover.
Fruit cake built on equal pounds of sugar, butter, eggs and flour is a direct descendant of the English pound cake, weighted down with far more dried fruit than a plain cake could carry -- the fruit and spirits were what made it a keeping cake, suitable for weddings, Christmas and any occasion worth planning weeks ahead. The Dixie Cook Book, like other late nineteenth-century compilations, gathered such recipes by contributor name and town, and Miss Angie Skinner's Somerset attribution is typical of a genre assembled from subscribers' own kitchens. The absence of any oven temperature or baking time is not carelessness: a cook working a wood range judged heat by hand and arm, and no printed number would have helped her. Note also the doubled dose of liquor -- brandy in the batter, wine poured over the warm cake -- a practice generally traced to the preserving value of alcohol as much as to taste, and one that let a household hold a cake for months in a era before refrigeration.