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Rough Robin
1½ lbs. (6 cups) flour 2 teaspoonfuls powdered 1/2 lb. (I cup) butter or cinnamon drippings 1/2 lb. (I cup) sugar 2 teaspoonfuls powdered ginger 1 pint (2 cups) cleaned 1 teaspoonful grated nutcurrants meg ½ teaspoonful salt 2 beaten eggs 1 pint (2 cups) seeded raisins 2 tablespoonfuls baking powder 1 teaspoonful powdered allspice Milk to moisten 1/2 lb. (2 cups) potato flour Rub the butter or drippings finely into the flours, then add the sugar, spices, salt, fruit and eggs; mix well with milk to make a stiff batter.
Pour into a well-buttered and floured cake tin.
Bake in a moderate oven for three hours.
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the two-column layout of the original page. Read in order it is: 1 1/2 lb (6 cups) flour; 1/2 lb (1 cup) butter or drippings; 1/2 lb (1 cup) sugar; 1 pint (2 cups) cleaned currants; 1 pint (2 cups) seeded raisins; 1/2 lb (2 cups) potato flour; 2 tsp cinnamon; 2 tsp ginger; 1 tsp grated nutmeg; 1 1/2 tsp salt; 2 beaten eggs; 2 tbsp baking powder; 1 tsp allspice; milk to moisten.
- The hinge: rub, do not creamThe fat is rubbed into the two flours as for pastry, so the crumb is short and slightly crumbly rather than cakelike. Work it to the texture of coarse meal before any sugar, spice or fruit goes in, and stop mixing as soon as the milk has brought it to a stiff, spoonable batter.
- Oven temperatureA 'moderate oven' in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere around 325-375F. A cake of this bulk baked three hours at the upper end will colour too hard at the edges; treat it as a large fruit cake and stay at 300-325F, with the tin lined and the top loosely covered with foil once it has coloured.
- Potato flourThis is potato starch, not the dehydrated potato flour sold for bread. It is still stocked as a starch or under the Passover name; cornflour/cornstarch behaves similarly, though the crumb will be a little drier.
- DrippingsBeef or bacon drippings were the everyday alternative to butter and give the cake a distinctly savoury edge. Use butter unless you want that; if you do use drippings, render and strain them first so no meat solids remain.
- FruitA pint measure of dried fruit is by volume, roughly 10-11 oz each of currants and raisins. Modern seedless raisins need no seeding. Toss the fruit in a spoonful of the measured flour so it does not sink through the stiff batter.
- Tin and yieldThis is a large recipe, about 5 lb of batter. A 10-inch round or 9-inch square deep tin, well buttered and floured, or two loaf tins baked around two hours. It gives 20 or more servings and keeps a week wrapped.
- Testing for donenessThree hours is a guide, not a rule. A skewer to the centre should come out clean and the cake should have stopped humming at the edge; the batter's density means the middle lags well behind the crust.
"Rough Robin" belongs to a large family of homely British fruit cakes whose names describe their looks rather than their origin -- rock cakes, rough cakes -- and the name is generally taken to refer to the deliberately rough, rubbed-in crumb rather than to any Robin in particular. The construction is essentially a very rich rubbed-in scone dough stretched with dried fruit and warm spice, the sort of thing baked once a week in a single big tin and cut down through the days. Two details are suggestive: the option of drippings in place of butter, often said to have been an unremarkable everyday choice in working households, and the half-pound of potato flour, used to lighten and dry a heavy fruit batter.