Home › Cakes, Puddings, and Pastry › Plum Cake
Plum Cake
(England.) Beat 1 1/2 pounds butter with 1 pound sugar, add beaten whites of 8 eggs, 1 1/2 pounds flour, 2 pounds currants, 8 ounces each of chopped candied lemon peel and citron, 1/2 ounce of mixed cinnamon and nutmeg, the zest of 2 oranges rubbed on 4 lumps of sugar. Beat after adding each ingredient, then fully 1/2 hour together. Pour into a tin lined with four layers of buttered paper, and lay two on top. Bake 3 hours; ice it with vanilla or chocolate icing.
This is a full-sized English rich fruit cake of the old school: no chemical leavening at all, so the half hour of beating is structural rather than decorative. Everything else follows from that.
- The beating is the leaveningThere is no baking powder, soda or yeast here, and only whipped whites for lift. The long beating drives air into the butter and holds it there; in a stand mixer, allow 10-15 minutes on the creamed butter and sugar, then fold rather than beat once the flour goes in, or the fruit will sink through a slack batter.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature, only a three-hour bake. Bake at 300F, and no hotter -- a cake of this density needs three hours at low heat to reach the centre. Drop to 275F for the last hour if the top is colouring.
- Tin and paperFour layers of buttered paper below and two on top is genuine insulation, not fussiness. Use a 10-inch deep round tin, double-line the sides and base with parchment standing an inch above the rim, and lay a loose parchment cap over the top for the first two hours.
- CurrantsThese are Zante currants -- small dried black grapes, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. Two pounds is a great deal; pick them over, rinse and dry them well, and toss them in a spoonful of the weighed flour so they stay suspended.
- Citron and candied peelCandied citron is the thick-cut peel of a large knobbly citrus, still sold in blocks at Italian and baking suppliers. Supermarket mixed peel is a thin, sweeter substitute; if you use it, cut the sugar slightly.
- Zest on sugar lumpsRubbing lumps of sugar over the orange skin was a common way of capturing the peel oil before microplanes. Grate the zest of two oranges finely into the sugar instead and rub it in with your fingertips.
- Spice quantityHalf an ounce of mixed cinnamon and nutmeg is roughly five to six teaspoons in total, which is assertive but in keeping with the period. About three of cinnamon and three of freshly grated nutmeg is a reasonable split.
- Testing and yieldA skewer into the centre should come out clean with no wet crumb; the cake will also pull very slightly from the tin sides. It weighs close to seven pounds and cuts into 30-40 thin slices. Cool completely in the tin before icing, and give it a day or two wrapped before cutting.
"Plum" in an English cake title has meant dried fruit -- currants, raisins, sultanas -- rather than the stone fruit since roughly the seventeenth century, which is why plum cake and plum pudding contain no plums. Cakes like this one sat at the rich end of a long tradition of enriched, fruited doughs, and by the nineteenth century the same basic formula was doing service as wedding, christening and Christmas cake, kept for weeks and often fed with spirits. The tell here is the absence of any raising agent: it belongs to the older method in which pounds of butter and beaten egg whites, worked by hand for half an hour, did all the work, and the four layers of buttered paper protected the batter through hours in the oven. Its appearance under "(England.)" reflects the plan of the book, which gathered dishes country by country.