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Bread Cake
Mrs. J. D. Odel.
Two cups dough, one and one-half cups sugar; one-half cup butter, one cup raisins, one cup currants, one teaspoon soda, two eggs, one teaspoon each of cinnamon, cloves, and allspice.
A raised-dough cake: bread dough already fermented on baking day is enriched with butter, sugar, fruit and spice, then baked as a loaf. The method assumes you know what to do with it, so most of the work is filling in what the original leaves unsaid.
- The dough is the flour"Two cups dough" means risen white bread dough taken from the day's batch; the recipe gives no separate flour because the dough supplies it. Two cups will weigh roughly a pound, though this varies with how far the dough has risen.
- Work it in properlyThe butter and sugar should be creamed together, the eggs beaten in, and that mixture then kneaded or beaten into the dough until no streaks of plain dough remain. This takes several minutes and is the hinge of the recipe — under-mixed bread cake bakes into marbled layers of sweet and bland.
- SodaOne teaspoon of what a period cook might still have called saleratus, i.e. baking soda. It is there to neutralise the acidity of a well-fermented dough as much as to lift it; dissolve it in a tablespoon of warm water or milk before adding so it disperses evenly.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. Both they and the raisins benefit from a brief soak in hot water and a thorough drain, since there is very little free liquid in this batter.
- Second riseScale into a greased loaf tin or two smaller ones, filling no more than two-thirds, and let it rise in a warm place until noticeably puffed — roughly 45 minutes to an hour. The enrichment slows the yeast considerably compared with plain bread.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven instruction at all; 350F is a reasonable modern equivalent for a fruited loaf of this kind. A single large loaf will take about 50 to 60 minutes; test with a skewer, and tent with foil if the fruit near the surface begins to scorch.
- Yield and keepingAbout one generous loaf. Like most dough cakes it is dense and better on the second day; it slices cleanly once fully cold and will keep several days wrapped.
Bread cake, sometimes called dough cake or raised cake, belongs to the era when the household's leavening was a living thing rather than a tin on the shelf. On baking day a cook set a sponge for loaves and could pinch off a portion to enrich with butter, sugar, spice and dried fruit — a cake got almost free, at the cost of a few extra hours' rising. Chemical leaveners were widely available by the 1870s, and the teaspoon of soda here shows the transition in progress, but yeast-raised cakes persisted because they used what was already at hand and because of their close, slightly tangy crumb. The recipe comes attached to the name of an individual woman, Mrs. J. D. Odel, and the terseness is characteristic: the recipe is a memorandum passed between cooks who already knew how a loaf was made and needed only the proportions of the additions.