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Spice Cake
Three pounds seedless raisins, one and a half pounds citron, one pound butter, two and a half coffee-cups sugar, two of sweet milk, four of flour, six eggs, two large tea-spoons baking powder, three tea-spoons cinnamon, two of mace. - Mrs. Gov. Potts, Montana.
This is a fruited spice cake of the old contributed-recipe kind: a list of quantities and nothing else. The proportions are sound, but the method, pan and oven are left entirely to the cook.
- It is much bigger than it looksFour and a half pounds of fruit against four cups of flour gives something on the order of nine or ten pounds of finished cake. Halve or quarter the whole list unless you are baking for a crowd, and expect two large loaf pans or one deep 10-inch tube pan even at half quantity.
- Coffee-cupCup names in American books of this period are not standardised, but a coffee-cup is usually reckoned at about 8 fl oz, the same as a modern cup, and a tea-cup smaller, around three-quarters of that. On that reading this is roughly 2 1/2 cups sugar, 2 cups milk, 4 cups flour.
- OvenNo temperature is given because none could be. A cake this rich and this heavy with fruit wants a slow oven, 300-325F, for two to three hours depending on pan depth, with the top covered in foil if it colours early.
- Flour the fruitThe instruction the recipe omits and most depends on: toss the raisins and diced citron in a few spoonfuls of the measured flour before folding them in, or the fruit sinks into a solid layer at the bottom.
- CitronCandied citron peel, not the fresh fruit and not lemon. It is still sold at holiday time and by mail; candied orange or lemon peel is the usual substitute, though it is sweeter and less resinous.
- MaceTwo teaspoons of mace is assertive by modern habit but correct for the period, and it is the flavour that separates this from a plain raisin cake. Ground mace loses its perfume quickly, so use a fresh jar.
- Baking powderPeriod powders were single-acting and variable in strength, so any conversion is rough; two level teaspoons of modern powder is a reasonable reading of 'two large tea-spoons'. Do not increase it; a heavy fruited batter that rises too fast simply collapses.
- Mixing and keepingCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add flour and milk alternately before the fruit. Wrapped well, the cake keeps for several days and may improve in that time.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the great wave of compiled American household books of the 1880s, assembled from contributions and printed in several regional editions, and its recipes carry their donors' names like a subscription list. The attribution here to "Mrs. Gov. Potts, Montana" points to the wife of Benjamin F. Potts, territorial governor of Montana from 1870 until 1883, and such names were presumably part of the selling: a reader in Georgia may well have been buying not just a cake but the authority of a governor's table. The cake itself sits on the line between spice cake and fruit cake, a distinction that barely existed then; heavily fruited, spiced with cinnamon and mace, and leavened with the chemical baking powder that had only recently displaced the saleratus-and-sour-milk methods of home baking. The citron is the tell of a prosperous kitchen, since candied peel came by ship and cost real money, and a pound and a half of it announced that the household could afford to bake on a scale.