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French Loaf Cake
One and a half cups sugar, three-fourths cup butter, onehalf cup milk, two and three-fourths cups flour, four eggs, one cup raisins stoned and chopped, three even teaspoons baking powder.
An ingredient list with no method, which was normal in 1900 — the reader was assumed to know that a loaf cake means creaming butter and sugar, then alternating flour and milk. The proportions are sound and the cake works; everything missing is procedural.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter with the sugar until pale, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk. Fold the raisins in last, dredged in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- OvenA loaf cake of this size wants a moderate oven, 350F, for 50 to 60 minutes. Test with a skewer in the centre; the crack that opens along the top is expected in a butter loaf and not a fault.
- PanThe batter fills one 9x5-inch loaf pan generously, greased and lined at the base; if it comes above two-thirds, hold a little back. Divided between two smaller pans it will bake in roughly 35 to 40 minutes.
- "Raisins stoned"Raisins of the period commonly still held their seeds and had to be pitted by hand. Modern seedless raisins go straight in; chopping is still worth doing so the fruit distributes rather than clumping.
- Baking powderThree even teaspoons to 2 3/4 cups flour is about a teaspoon per cup, close to modern practice. Early tartrate powders acted quickly on contact with liquid, so mix and get the loaf into the oven without delay.
- FlourHousehold flour of the period was often softer than modern all-purpose. Measure by weight if you can - about 12 oz - and spoon rather than scoop, or the loaf turns dry.
- Butter and saltNo salt is listed, and butter of the period was generally salted. With unsalted butter add half a teaspoon to the flour.
- YieldOne loaf, about twelve slices. It keeps three or four days wrapped and is better on the second day.
Loaf cake in nineteenth-century American usage meant a rich butter cake baked in a bread pan rather than a tin or mould, and the name says more about the vessel than the recipe. Why this one is "French" is anyone's guess: by 1900 the adjective was applied loosely to anything a publisher wished to make sound refined, and it attached to everything from dressing to toast to ice cream. Placing it among the "Dainty Dishes" fits that impulse: a cake of four eggs and a cup of raisins, given a continental label. The bare ingredient list is itself period evidence: cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s are often said to be transitional documents, printing measured quantities (a genuine advance over "butter the size of an egg") while trusting the cook to know what to do with them.