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Hartford Election Cake
The old Connecticut rule for Hartford election cake which is one of the best of the loaf cakes, was two pounds of sugar, two pounds of butter, four eggs, a quart of milk, two cups of yeast, two pounds of raisins, half a pound of citron, half an ounce of nutmeg and five pounds of flour dried and sifted. Beat the butter and half the sugar to a cream and mix very fine in the flour, then add half the milk, blood warm in summer and hot in winter, but not hot enough to scald the yeast. Add the yeast and beat thoroughly. Add also the eggs, and finally the remainder of the milk. Beat the batter thoroughly. Let the cake rise over night, and in the morning beat it again and add the remainder of the sugar. Let the cake rise five or six hours longer, or until it is very light. Then add the fruit, pour it into pans and let it rise three-quarters of an hour in the pans, then put it in the oven and bake one hour.
This is a yeast-raised loaf cake scaled for a household or a town gathering: five pounds of flour makes something on the order of five large loaves. Read the whole thing before starting, because the timeline runs overnight plus most of the next day.
- Scale it downQuarter the recipe for a single 9x5 loaf plus a little extra: about 1 lb 4 oz flour, 8 oz sugar, 8 oz butter, 1 egg, 1 cup milk, 8 oz raisins, 2 oz citron. The proportions are forgiving; the method is not.
- Two cups of yeastThis means liquid barm or a wet homemade sponge, not dry yeast. For a quartered batch use about 1 1/2 teaspoons instant or active dry yeast. Expect the rises to be faster than the original's five or six hours.
- Blood warmAround 98F. The warning about scalding matters: keep the milk below roughly 120F, since temperatures approaching 130-140F will kill the yeast, and the recipe's whole structure depends on it.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for an hour suits a loaf this rich; check for 190-200F at the centre, and tent the top with foil if it colours before the crumb sets.
- NutmegHalf an ounce is roughly two tablespoons of freshly grated nutmeg across five pounds of flour, which reads as strong to modern palates but is in keeping with the period. Scale it with everything else and grate it fresh; pre-ground has little left.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold with the candied fruit at the holidays. Candied orange or lemon peel is the nearest substitute if you cannot find it.
- Flour dried and siftedBarrel flour was damp and lumpy, so it was warmed by the fire before use. Skip the drying; sift or whisk to aerate, and weigh rather than scoop, since five pounds by volume can vary by a cup or more.
- Creaming butter into flourBeating butter and sugar to a cream and then rubbing it into the flour before any liquid goes in coats the flour with fat, which is why the crumb comes out short and tender rather than bready. Do not shortcut it into a straight dough.
- Fruit lastRaisins and citron go in only after the long second rise. Added earlier they weigh down a slack, sugar-heavy dough and drag the fermentation.
Election cake belongs to the New England civic calendar: spring election day in Connecticut and Massachusetts drew freemen into town, and a large, keeping, yeast-raised fruit loaf was the thing baked to feed them. A recipe titled "Election Cake" appears in Amelia Simmons's American Cookery of 1796, one of the earliest printed American cookbooks, in a version even larger than this one, and Hartford's name attached itself to the style; Hartford was one of Connecticut's two capitals at the period and the seat of the May election session. What distinguishes it from later fruitcakes is the leavening: it is raised with barm, the yeast skimmed off brewing or saved from bread-making, which is why the timing runs to an overnight rise and then most of a day. The cake is handed on here as "the old Connecticut rule" -- a heritage item quoted from memory rather than a weeknight bake.