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Fruit Cake (Three pounds butter three)
Three pounds butter, three of brown sugar, beaten to a cream, three of flour, six of currants, six of raisins, after seeds are removed, one of citron sliced thin, three glasses brandy, twenty-eight eggs, one ounce cinnamon, one of grated nutmeg, three-quarters ounce cloves, half ounce mace; roll the raisins, currants and citron in part of the flour. - Miss H. D. M
This is a full-scale wedding or Christmas fruit cake from an era when such cakes were made once a year in quantity. As written it produces roughly 25 pounds of batter; almost everyone will want to divide it.
- Scale firstButter, sugar and flour at three pounds each, plus twelve pounds of dried fruit, a pound of citron and twenty-eight eggs, comes to about 25-26 lb of batter — enough to fill several large pans. Dividing by four or six gives a batch a domestic mixer and oven can actually handle.
- The hinge: no leaveningThere is no soda, no baking powder, and no liquid but brandy and eggs. Everything depends on creaming the butter and sugar thoroughly and beating the eggs until light before they go in. If the eggs are dumped in cold and unbeaten, the batter breaks and the cake bakes dense and greasy.
- "Three glasses brandy"A wineglass in nineteenth-century American recipes is generally taken as about 2 fl oz, so roughly 6 fl oz total. Some cooks used a tumbler, which would be far more. Given the volume of batter, the smaller reading is the safer one.
- EggsEggs of the period ran smaller than today's large egg. Twenty-eight then is closer to twenty-two or twenty-four large eggs now, or about 2 lb 8 oz of shelled egg if you prefer to weigh.
- Currants and raisinsCurrants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. "After seeds are removed" indicates the seeded raisins of the period, probably muscatels, which had to be seeded by hand; modern seedless raisins go straight in.
- CitronCandied citron — the peel of the citron melon or the citron fruit, boiled in syrup. It is still sold at holiday time; candied orange and lemon peel substitute acceptably, though the flavour is milder.
- SpicesThese are weights, not spoonfuls. An ounce of ground cinnamon is about 4 tablespoons, an ounce of nutmeg about 4 tablespoons grated, three-quarters ounce of cloves about 3 tablespoons, half an ounce of mace about 2½ tablespoons. Scale them with the rest of the recipe.
- Flouring the fruitTossing the fruit in part of the measured flour keeps it suspended rather than sinking. Take the flour from the three pounds already called for, not in addition to it.
- Oven and timeThe original gives none. A cake this rich wants a slow oven, 275-300F, with the pans lined in doubled parchment and the tops covered once coloured. Large cakes run three to five hours; test with a skewer at the centre rather than by the clock.
- KeepingWrap the cooled cakes in brandy-dampened cloth and store airtight in a cool place. Cakes of this composition were made weeks or months ahead and improved for it — the sugar and spirit are the preservative.
Cakes like this one are the American descendants of the English plum cake, and the size is striking: twelve pounds of dried fruit against three of flour makes a cake that is essentially preserved fruit bound with batter, which is why it kept so long. The Dixie Cook-Book prints several such formulas side by side under contributors' initials, of which "Miss H. D. M" is one. The seeding of raisins, noted here in passing, was one of the tedious jobs of the season; commercial seedless raisins displaced it only gradually.