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Fruit Cake (Twelve eggs one and a half)
Twelve eggs, one and a half pounds each of butter, sugar and flour, two pounds each of raisins and currants, one pound citron, one half-pint molasses, one ounce each of nutmeg, mace and cloves, one and a half glasses of jelly (grape is best), one-fourth pint each of wine and brandy, more flour if needed. Put dough in pans, set in steamer, taking care that the cover is made to fit very tight; if necessary put cloth under the lid and shut it down on it, taking care that it does not touch the cake, or lay several thicknesses of cloth over the lid. Steam two hours and bake one hour. - Chas. Cyphers, Minneapolis, Minn.
This is a full holiday-scale fruit cake: roughly twelve pounds of batter and fruit before the liquor goes in. Read the quantities first and decide how much you actually want, then note that the steam-then-bake method is the whole point of the recipe.
- Steam first, bake secondThe two hours of covered steaming set the cake gently and keep a dense, heavily fruited batter from drying at the edges before the centre cooks. The tight lid and the cloth are there to stop condensation dripping onto the surface; a stockpot with a rack, foil over the pans, and a folded towel under the lid does the same job. The final hour of baking dries the crust. The recipe gives no oven temperature; a low oven of about 300F suits the purpose.
- Old measuresA half-pint of molasses is 1 cup; one-fourth pint each of wine and brandy is 1/2 cup each. A "glass" of jelly means a jelly tumbler, which ran anywhere from a scant half cup to a full cup, so one and a half glasses is genuinely imprecise — figure roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of grape jelly and treat it as a moistener.
- An ounce each of nutmeg, mace and clovesAn ounce of ground nutmeg is about 4 tablespoons, and the same again of mace and cloves. Even across twelve pounds of batter this is assertive by modern palates; a third of it gives a cake that still tastes plainly spiced. Buy whole nutmeg and grate it if you want the quantity to make sense.
- Currants and citronCurrants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. Citron is candied citron peel, sold in blocks or diced around the winter holidays; candied orange and lemon peel substitute without complaint.
- Flour the fruit"More flour if needed" most likely means adding flour until the batter holds a heavy load of fruit. Separately, tossing the raisins, currants and citron with a few spoonfuls of the measured flour before folding them in helps keep the fruit from sinking in a batter this wet.
- Pans and donenessDivide into deep pans — loaf or tube pans lined with buttered parchment — no more than about two-thirds full, since steamed cake has nowhere to shed moisture. A skewer should come out clean and the internal temperature should read near 200F; heavily fruited batter reads underdone by feel long after it is cooked.
- Yield and keepingExpect something in the region of twelve pounds of finished cake, enough for three or four large loaves. Cakes of this kind were meant to be wrapped and stored for weeks, brushed with a little more brandy; the sugar, dried fruit and spirits are the preservative, and the flavour genuinely improves.
Fruit cakes steamed before baking turn up in nineteenth-century American community cookbooks, and The Dixie Cook-Book is exactly that sort of collection — recipes signed by contributors, here Chas. Cyphers of Minneapolis, which is a reminder that the book's reach went well beyond the South its title advertises. The method belongs to a kitchen where oven heat was uneven and hard to hold low: steaming did the slow cooking that a thermostat now does, and the hour in the oven only finished the crust. The proportions run in the English plum-cake direction, equal weights of butter, sugar and flour — a pound and a half of each — against five pounds of dried fruit and citron, well over three times the flour weight, carried into American practice and sweetened further with molasses and jelly. Wine and brandy are both flavouring and preservative, in the tradition of cakes baked weeks ahead of Christmas or a wedding and fed with spirits until served.