Thanksgiving Fruit Cake

A yeast-raised fruit cake of the old barm-and-brandy school, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what she was doing. The text as printed breaks off mid-sentence, so one ingredient is lost.

• The recipe is incompleteIt ends at "small tea-spoon -" with the ingredient missing. In cakes of this type the missing item is usually soda or salt, but the book does not say, and neither should we. There are also no mixing, rising or baking instructions at all.
• ScaleSix pounds of flour, three of butter and four of raisins add up to something like eighteen or nineteen pounds of batter, enough for several large loaf-sized cakes. Divide the whole list by six for a single cake in a modern kitchen.
• A glass of wineA wineglass in nineteenth-century American measure is about 2 fluid ounces, so two glasses of wine and two of brandy come to half a cup each. That is the only liquid named besides the yeast, which tells you the batter was meant to be very stiff.
• One pint of yeastThis means liquid yeast or barm, a homemade ferment that acted as both leaven and liquid. It is not interchangeable with a packet of dry yeast; a pint of barm is mostly water with a modest population of yeast in it, and substituting dry yeast alone leaves the batter far too dry.
• An ounce of maceGround mace by weight, roughly four to five tablespoons, which is aggressive by modern palates even across a batch this size; reduce it if you want the fruit and brandy to read at all.
• Only six eggsSix eggs for six pounds of flour is very little structure by the standards of a modern fruit cake. The yeast, not the eggs, is doing the lifting here, which makes this closer to a rich sweet bread than to the dense pound-cake-style fruit cake that later displaced it.
• OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction at all. A cake this size and richness wants a slow oven by modern reckoning, something in the region of 300F for two to three hours for a large loaf, with the top covered if it colors early; the temperature is a modern suggestion, not the book's.
• Fruit and citronHalf a pound of citron is candied citron peel, still sold at holiday time and worth seeking out; the raisins in an 1880s Southern kitchen would have been seeded by hand, so use ordinary seedless dark raisins and toss them in a little of the measured flour to keep them suspended.