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White Fruit Cake (Two cupfuls of sugar one)
Two cupfuls of sugar, one cupful of butter, one cupful of sweet milk, two and one-half cupfuls of flour. Whites of seven eggs, two teaspoonfuls of baking powder. One pound each of seeded raisins, figs, and blanched almonds, and one-quarter of a pound of citron all chopped fine, one cupful grated cocoanut. One-half cup of candied cherries may be added if desired. Bake slowly two hours.
A white fruit cake is a butter cake carrying about three pounds of fruit and nuts in two and a half cupfuls of flour, so the batter functions as mortar rather than crumb. Nearly everything that can go wrong here is a matter of pan, temperature and patience.
- "Bake slowly"A slow oven in this period is usually reckoned somewhere between 250F and 325F; around 300F suits a cake this dense. Two hours at that heat in a deep pan is realistic; test with a skewer in the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- Pan and liningNo pan is specified. Use a 9-inch or 10-inch tube pan, or two 9x5 loaf tins, lined with parchment on base and sides. The fruit and sugar load will catch badly on bare metal over two hours.
- Protect the topCoconut and sugar brown long before the centre sets. Lay a sheet of parchment or foil loosely over the cake once the surface has coloured, roughly the halfway mark.
- Sweet milkThis means plain fresh milk, specified to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that other recipes of the era call for. Whole milk is what is wanted.
- Egg whitesSeven whites come to roughly 7 oz, a scant cup, by modern large eggs; period eggs may have run smaller. Beat them to soft peaks and fold in last; whipped to stiff, dry peaks they break up when the fruit goes in.
- Coconut"Grated cocoanut" is fresh coconut, unsweetened. Substitute unsweetened desiccated or finely shredded coconut, not the sweetened flake sold for toppings, which would push an already very sweet cake over.
- Flouring the fruitHold back a few tablespoons of the measured flour and toss the chopped raisins, figs, almonds, citron and cherries in it before folding them through. Otherwise the fruit sinks to the base during a two-hour bake.
- Yield and keepingThe fruit alone is over three and a quarter pounds, and the finished cake will run to something like five and a half to six pounds. Wrapped closely, it improves over several days; the fruit and sugar keep it moist for a week or more at cool room temperature.
White fruit cake, sometimes called bride's cake, was the pale counterpart to the dark, molasses-and-spice Christmas cake: egg whites only, no spice, no brown sugar, and fruit chosen for its light colour. The style rose with the late nineteenth-century taste for white wedding cakes and with the wider availability of imported figs, citron, almonds and coconut in American grocery stores, which is why a recipe of this period can call for a pound each of three of them without comment. A cake that used seven whites while wasting the yolks was itself a small display of plenty. Chemical baking powder, only a few decades in common household use by the end of the century, helps so heavy a fruit load to rise.