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Bread Cake
Three cups light dough, two cups clean brown sugar, one cup butter, one-half teaspoonful soda, three eggs, three teaspoonfuls cinnamon, one of cloves. Add fruit if you choose. The dough should be rubbed with butter when rising to prevent a hard crust. Mix with the hand thoroughly and turn in baking tin to stand till very light. Bake one hour protecting the top with brown paper.
This is a yeast-raised cake built on a piece of the day's bread dough rather than a chemical leavener. The method is closer to making a sweet enriched bread than a cake batter, and the timings depend on the dough, not the clock.
- "Light dough" means risen bread doughThree cups is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of white bread dough taken after its first rise, when it is fully puffed. Any plain lean bread dough works; sourdough will read as tangy against the sugar and spice.
- Why the soda is thereThe half teaspoon of soda neutralises the acidity a well-risen or slightly over-risen dough develops, and gives a little lift to compensate for the fat and sugar slowing the yeast. It is a corrective, not the leavening.
- Buttering the dough while it risesThe recipe says the butter is to prevent a hard crust; rubbing the surface stops a dry skin forming, which could work into the finished crumb. A covered bowl does the same job, but the butter is no trouble.
- Mixing by hand is not optionalMixing -- The recipe calls for mixing with the hand: sugar, butter and eggs have to be worked into an already-developed gluten network. A stand mixer with the paddle on low will do it, but expect several minutes of squelching before the mass stops looking curdled and comes together smooth and glossy.
- The second rise"Stand till very light" means in the tin until visibly domed and airy, which with this much sugar and fat can take 1 1/2 to 3 hours in a warm room. Rushing it gives a heavy, bready cake.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; 325-350F suits an hour's bake in a deep tin. Test at 190-200F internal, or with a skewer that comes out clean.
- Brown paperA sheet of brown paper laid over the top was the period shield against scorching. Loosely tented foil or parchment for the last half of the bake does the same.
- Pan and yieldA 9-inch tube pan or two 8x4-inch loaf tins will take this; fill no more than about halfway, as it is close to their capacity. It makes about 12 to 16 servings and, like most yeast-raised cakes, should keep better than a butter cake.
- If you add fruitThe recipe gives no quantity. One to two cups of raisins, currants or chopped candied peel would suit a cake this size. Toss them in a little flour and work them in at the very end.
Bread cake belongs to the long era before reliable chemical leaveners, when a cook who was already baking bread had risen dough on hand and could convert a piece of it into something sweet with sugar, butter, eggs and spice. Recipes of this kind appear under names like raised cake, dough cake and bread cake through nineteenth-century English and American household books, and they survived into collections like this one, kept alive at least in part by the particular chewy, close crumb they produce. The soda is a small piece of evidence about the period pantry: saleratus and then bicarbonate of soda were cheap and widely available long before standardised baking powder, and they are often said to have served to sweeten a sour dough as well as to raise it. The name is worth distinguishing from the Yorkshire bread cake, which is a plain soft bread roll and no relation. Spicing with cinnamon and cloves and the optional dried fruit places this squarely in the older tradition of the spiced fruited loaf, which in wealthier kitchens became the raised fruit cake.