Wedding Cake

This is a nineteenth-century bride's cake in its oldest form: a barrel of fruit held together by just enough batter, baked slow and kept for years. The list gives no method and no oven, so the notes below fill in what a cook of the period would have assumed.

• Scale it downThe full formula yields roughly 43 lb of cake, enough for a wedding of a hundred or more. A tenth of the recipe is workable in a home kitchen: 5 eggs, 8 oz each sugar, flour and butter, 1 lb 8 oz raisins, 5 oz citron, 1 lb currants, and about 3 tablespoons brandy.
• Eggs were smallerFifty period eggs may have run to something like 5 lb in the shell, which would put the eggs roughly level with the butter, sugar and flour by weight, though the recipe gives no way to confirm it. Modern large eggs are heavier; weigh them out of the shell — perhaps 4 lb 6 oz for the full batch — rather than counting to fifty.
• The spice quantitiesCloves and cinnamon are given in ounces, and the mace and nutmeg almost certainly follow in the same unit, which is a great deal of both. Four ounces of grated nutmeg in a 43 lb cake is assertive but not implausible for the period; scale by weight and taste the raw batter if the proportion worries you.
• There is no leaveningNothing rises this cake but the eggs. Cream the butter and sugar thoroughly, beat the eggs until they are pale and thick, and fold rather than stir once the flour goes in. Dust the fruit with a little of the measured flour so it does not sink.
• OvenThe recipe names no oven, but a cake this dense wants a slow one — somewhere around 275F in a modern oven — and hours rather than minutes. Expect roughly three to four hours for a 9-inch pan, and longer again for the very large pans a batch this size implies. Line the pan with several layers of paper and tent the top once it colours.
• Citron and currantsCitron is candied citron peel, sold in blocks; chop it yourself rather than buying diced mixed peel, which is mostly orange. Currants here are Zante currants, the small dried grape, not fresh redcurrants.
• The brandy does the keepingA pint in the batter, and traditionally more brushed over the cooled cake at intervals while it is wrapped in cloth and stored in a tin. Sugar, fruit and spirit together do help a cake like this keep, though twenty years should be read as a boast rather than a tested claim; a year or two is the practical limit for good eating.
• Cut thinServe in slices a quarter-inch thick. The full cake gives several hundred portions; the tenth-scale version comfortably serves twenty.