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White Fruit Cake (One cupful of butter two)
One cupful of butter, two cupfuls sugar, two-thirds of a cupful of sweet milk, two and one-half cupfuls flour, whites of seven eggs, two even teaspoonfuls baking powder, one pound of raisins, one pound figs, dates and blanched almonds, one-quarter pound citron cut all fine. Beat all well before adding fruit. Stir fruit in last, with a sifting of flour over it. Bake slowly.
A white fruit cake is a butter cake carrying nearly its own weight in fruit and nuts, so the two things that matter are the low oven and the pan. Everything else is straightforward creaming method.
- "Bake slowly"In period terms a slow oven, usually taken as about 300-325F. A cake this dense will want something like 2 to 2 1/2 hours in a lined tube pan or two loaf pans; test with a skewer at the centre, and tent the top with foil if it colours before the middle sets.
- An ambiguous fruit list"One pound figs, dates and blanched almonds" can be read as a pound of each or a pound divided between the three. A pound total, roughly 5 or 6 oz apiece, gives a cake that still slices; a pound each puts the fruit near 4 lb and makes it closer to a confection than a cake. The original does not settle it.
- Sweet milkOrdinary whole milk. The word only distinguishes it from sour milk or buttermilk, which were the other things likely to be in a nineteenth-century kitchen and which would want soda rather than baking powder.
- Seven egg whitesAbout 7 fl oz, a scant cup, from modern large eggs. The recipe does not say to whip them; folding them in at soft peaks after the batter is mixed gives a lighter crumb than beating them in whole, and either reading works.
- CitronCandied citron peel, still sold at holiday time and worth seeking out for the resinous, faintly bitter edge it gives. Candied lemon or orange peel substitutes acceptably; the glacé cherry mixes sold as "fruit cake fruit" do not.
- Flouring the fruitThe sifting of flour over the fruit is best taken from the 2 1/2 cupfuls already measured rather than added to it, though the recipe does not say which. It keeps the pieces from sinking, so add them at the very end and fold only until distributed.
- Pan preparationButter the pan and line it with parchment, sides included. Over a bake this long even a slow oven can over-brown the exterior of an unlined tin, and the sugar in the dried fruit sticks hard.
- Yield and keepingOn the lighter reading of the fruit list this makes something in the region of a 4 1/2 to 5 lb cake. Wrapped closely and kept in a tin it keeps well for a week or two.
White fruit cake was the pale counterpart to the dark, molasses-and-spice Christmas cake, and it is often associated with the names bride's cake or wedding cake. The whiteness was largely the point: egg whites only, white sugar, no molasses, no browning spices, and light-coloured fruit — figs, dates, almonds, citron. It was a cake for an occasion, expensive in eggs and butter and in imported candied peel. The instruction "bake slowly" and nothing more assumes a cook who judged a wood or coal range by hand and experience, which is why period recipes give quantities to the quarter-pound and temperatures not at all.