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Scotch Fruit Cake
A cup butter, two of white sugar, four of sifted flour, threefourths cup sour milk, half tea-spoon soda, nine eggs beaten separately, one pound raisins, half pound currants, a fourth pound citron; cream the butter and sugar, add milk gradually, then beaten yolks of eggs, and lastly, while stirring in flour, the whites well whipped. Flavor with one tea-spoon lemon, and one of vanilla extract, and have raisins chopped a little, or, better still, seeded, and citron sliced thin. Wash and dry currants before using, and flour all fruit slightly. In putting cake in pan, place first a thin layer of cake, then sprinkle in some of the three kinds of fruit, then a layer of cake, and so on, always finishing off with a thin layer of cake. Bake in a moderate oven for two hours. Tested by many and has never failed. -Mrs. J. H. Shearer.
A large butter-and-egg fruit cake of the contributed-recipe type, leavened mostly by whipped whites. The instructions are complete but assume a cook who already knows her pan sizes and her oven.
- The hinge: layering, not stirringThe fruit is never mixed into the batter. Spoon in a thin layer of batter, scatter fruit, repeat, and finish with batter so no raisin or citron touches the pan wall and scorches. Flouring the fruit first, as directed, is what keeps it suspended.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" is conventionally taken to mean roughly 325-350F; the book itself gives no degrees. For a cake this dense held two hours, use the low end -- 325F -- and line the pan with two layers of parchment; tent the top with foil once it has coloured.
- Pan and yieldThis is close to five pounds of batter and fruit. A 10-inch tube pan, or two 9x5-inch loaf pans, will hold it. Twenty to twenty-four servings; loaves will be done nearer 75-90 minutes, so test rather than trust the clock.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Use buttermilk, or 3/4 cup whole milk with 2 teaspoons lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- EggsEggs in the 1880s likely ran somewhat smaller than today's large, so eight large eggs, separated, may come nearer the original weight. The whipped whites supply most of the lift; the half teaspoon of soda reacts with the acid in the sour milk, giving some rise as it neutralises it.
- Currants and citronCurrants means dried Zante currants, not fresh red currants; the washing and drying instruction is for grit and stem, and is worth doing. Citron here is candied citron peel (the citron-melon was also candied and sold under the same name in the South), still sold at holidays; candied orange or lemon peel substitutes without complaint.
- FlourFour cups sifted flour is roughly 16 ounces. Southern soft-wheat flour was weaker than modern all-purpose; sift, then spoon into the cup rather than scooping, or the cake tightens.
- Doneness and keepingA skewer into the centre should come out clean of batter, though it may pick up melted fruit. Cool completely in the pan. Wrapped tight, the cake improves over three or four days and keeps a fortnight.
"Scotch" attached to a great many nineteenth-century American cakes without much genealogical rigour, and this one is a good example: it carries no spice and no spirits, which is what actually distinguishes a Dundee cake or a Scottish black bun from an English plum cake. What it is, in practice, is a rich white fruit cake -- white sugar, no molasses, no dark spicing -- of the kind Southern households baked for weddings and Christmas. The Dixie Cook Book, compiled in Atlanta in the 1880s from the same stock of contributed recipes that fed dozens of regional cookbooks, prints it under a contributor's name with her own guarantee attached, "tested by many and has never failed." That endorsement is the whole social apparatus of the community cookbook in one line: the recipe travelled on the reputation of the woman who signed it.