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Loaf Cake
Another method of making loaf cake, was with bread dough. The tested rule for this is three cups of risen dough, one and one-half cups of sugar, three-quarters of a cup of melted butter, three eggs, a cup of raisins, and half a nutmeg. Mix the sugar and butter into the dough with the hand; then beat the batter vigorously, working the ingredients thoroughly together. Add the raisins last of all. Pour the batter into buttered pans and let it rise in them for half an hour; then let it bake for an hour in an oven after the bread is taken out. A feature of these cakes was a thick icing which completely covered them.
A yeast-raised cake made by enriching bread dough, once the standard way to make cake in a household that baked its own bread. It behaves more like a sweet brioche than a modern butter cake.
- The hinge: the dough must be fully risen and still livelyThree cups of risen dough means roughly 1 to 1.25 lb of ordinary white bread dough at its first full rise. Sugar and fat slow yeast considerably, so dough that is sluggish or spent will never lift the enriched batter, and the loaf bakes dense and greasy.
- The eggsThe ingredient list calls for three eggs but the method never says when to add them. Beat them in with the sugar and melted butter before the dough goes in; adding them last will leave streaks you cannot work out without knocking the air back.
- Oven temperature"An oven after the bread is taken out" is a wood or coal oven on a falling heat; the book gives no temperature. In a modern oven, a moderate 325 to 350F for the full hour is a reasonable equivalent. Cover the top with foil if it browns before the centre sets.
- Half a nutmegA whole nutmeg grates to about 2 to 3 teaspoons, so half is 1 to 1.5 teaspoons. Grate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg is much flatter and this is the only spice in the cake.
- Pans and yieldThe quantity fills two 8x4 inch loaf pans or one 9x5 with a little left over. Fill the pans no more than two-thirds, since the half-hour proof plus oven spring is substantial.
- The half-hour riseJudge it by the dough, not the clock. In a warm kitchen the batter may be ready in twenty minutes; in a cold one it will want closer to an hour. It should look visibly puffed and feel slack, not doubled.
- RaisinsToss them in a spoonful of flour before folding them in at the end, or they sink through the loose batter. Plumping them briefly in hot water first keeps them from scorching against the pan.
- DonenessAn hour is a reasonable guide, but an enriched loaf this wet is best checked with a skewer or a thermometer; the centre should reach about 200F. The "thick icing which completely covered them" is not described further; a plain water or boiled sugar glaze, poured over once the loaves were cold, would suit.
Loaf cake of this kind belongs to the era when a household kept a bread sponge going as a matter of routine, and cake was simply bread dough taken further with sugar, butter, eggs and dried fruit. It shares its logic with German Stollen and the older English "great cakes": before chemical leavening was cheap and reliable, yeast was one of the few lifts available, and the residual heat of the oven after the day's bread came out was free. American cookbooks through the nineteenth century printed such cakes often, under names like "election cake" or "dough cake," and by the time this book appeared the recipe was already being framed in the past tense - "another method," "a feature of these cakes was" - because baking powder and soda had taken over the cake page.