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Wedding Cake
Place in a tureen two pounds thoroughly picked Corinth raisins, two pounds Smyrna raisins, a pound seeded Malaga raisins, half pound each chopped candied lemon and orange peel, four ounces chopped candied ginger, and add grated rind of an orange and a sound lemon. Pour in a gill good rum and half gill brandy, mix all well together and let infuse for an hour. Place one and a half pounds of good butter in a lukewarm earthen tureen and sharply work with a wooden spoon until creamy. Add a pound powdered sugar, sharply mix for a minute and add one by one twelve fresh eggs, continually and briskly mixing while adding. Add one and a half pounds sifted flour, stir well, then add raisins, etc., with a gill molasses, tablespoon powdered cinnamon, a half teaspoon each nutmeg, allspice, ground mace, ground cloves and salt, mix well together for five minutes. Have a wedding-cake mould three inches high by eight inches in diameter, lightly butter, then line interior with a sheet of buttered white paper and drop preparation into it. Neatly smooth the surface, set in a slow oven for an hour, bring to oven door, place a double sheet buttered paper on top and reset in oven for three hours. Remove, lay on a table, lift paper off top, then pour over a half gill rum, let rest for four hours, unmould on a wire pastry grating and remove paper. Sharply knead in a saucepan a half pound glazed sugar with the white of an egg, beat up with spatula for five minutes and carefully glaze cake on top and all around, being careful that glaze is well spread all over and neatly smoothed, then let dry for one hour. Place a fancy paper on a round wooden board same size as cake, but have paper a little wider than board, and place wedding-bell in centre of cake. Place in a bowl the white of half an egg, two ounces glazed sugar, six drops vanilla essence, and sharply mix with a wooden spoon for eight minutes. Slide a small fancy tube in at bottom of pastry bag, drop in preparation, and with it decorate surface and all around edges according to taste. The cake will then be ready.
A full British-style wedding fruitcake in Delmonico's house style: roughly eleven pounds of batter, four hours in a low oven, then rum, royal icing and a piped finish. Read the pan note before you start, because the mould specified will not hold what the recipe makes.
- The pan is far too smallOver six pounds of fruit and peel plus butter, sugar, twelve eggs and flour comes to something like eleven or twelve pounds of batter, while an 8-inch round only three inches deep will hold roughly three pounds. Either quarter the batter for that tin or divide the full quantity among three or four 8-inch pans, or one 10-inch pan at least 4 inches deep plus a loaf.
- Raisin namesCorinth raisins are dried currants (the small black kind, not fresh red currants). Smyrna raisins are sultanas or golden raisins. Malaga raisins are large muscatels, seeded; muscat raisins or ordinary large raisins substitute.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. So a gill of rum plus half a gill of brandy is 1/2 cup rum and 1/4 cup brandy for the soak, a gill (1/2 cup) molasses in the batter, and a half gill (1/4 cup) rum poured over the cake when it comes out of the oven.
- Slow ovenRead as about 275-300F (140-150C); a fruit batter this dense and sugary scorches at the edges if pushed much hotter. The buttered paper laid over the top after the first hour acts as a heat shield -- keep it there, or use loose foil.
- Total baking timeFour hours is right for one very large cake, not for divided batter. If you split it among 8-inch pans, expect closer to 2 to 2 1/2 hours; test with a skewer at the centre, which should come out clean but slightly sticky from fruit.
- Glazed sugarAn older term for very finely powdered sugar for icing -- use modern confectioners' (icing) sugar. Half a pound beaten with one egg white makes the flat coating; the two ounces with half a white and vanilla is the stiffer piping icing. If raw egg white is a concern, use pasteurised whites or meringue powder.
- Lining and unmouldingButter the tin, then line base and sides with buttered parchment standing an inch above the rim. Let the cake cool substantially in the tin before turning out; hot fruitcake at this weight tears itself apart.
- RestingThe four-hour rest is a minimum. Wrapped in rum-dampened cloth and foil, this cake improves for weeks and traditionally was made a month or more before the wedding. Ice it only when you are ready to serve.
- YieldThe full quantity gives roughly 10 to 11 pounds of finished cake -- 60 to 80 thin slices, which is the point: wedding fruitcake is cut small and sent home with guests.
This comes from Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows how firmly the English wedding cake had settled into American practice: a dark, spirit-soaked fruit cake, sealed under hard white royal icing, decorated with piped work and topped with a sugar or paper wedding bell. The white icing was the fashionable point -- a bleached, glassy shell over a nearly black interior -- and the alcohol was structural as much as flavouring, since it preserved a cake that had to be baked well ahead of the day and often kept, in the tradition still followed in Britain, for a christening a year later. The fruit list is a snapshot of the imported-goods trade of the period: currants named for Corinth, sultanas shipped through Smyrna, muscatels from Malaga, candied peel and ginger, the sort of imported stock that is part of why a cake like this read as celebratory in the first place.