Plum Cake

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Fruit cake (also plum cake or black cake)

Plum cake (formerly plumb cake ; German: plum cakes) is a British fruit bread (fruit cake), which up to half of its weight consists of dried fruits. Plum cakes can be documented in writing at the end of the 1600s and got their name from their filling with raisins and currants, which the English called plums ( dried prunes ) around 1660 . After 1830, plum cakes were also known as black cake or fruit cake .

Plum cakes were usually not baked with yeast, but air was added to the dough by beating strongly. As with the pound cake, the dough was made from a pound of flour, sugar, butter and eggs, plus 4 to 5 pounds of fruit. It was enough for up to 50 people as the cake was very filling.

Guildford City records show that a large plum cake was presented to the Duke of York (later James I) when he visited the city in 1674. This tradition was revived in 1957 when Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh visited the city. In England and France, a large cake was baked to commemorate the Three Kings before or at Epiphany.

During the Civil War , it was the standard cake in the United States. According to the cookbook author Eliza Leslie (* 1787; † 1858), it was common in the 18th century to give away a large plum cake for celebrations such as Christmas and Epiphany.

French bakers respected the origin of the plum cake when adopting the recipe and called it gâteau anglaise or plum cake, both of which are the names for a light cake, a kind of genoa cake (not to be confused with Génoise ). In Germany, the English cake is a variant of the plum cake.

supporting documents

  1. ↑ plum cake | Definition of plum cake in US English by Oxford Dictionaries. Retrieved April 10, 2019 .
  2. ^ A b Alan Davidson: The Oxford Companion to Food . Oxford University Press, 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-967733-7 , pp. 330 ( google.de [accessed April 9, 2019]).
  3. ↑ a b The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets . Oxford University Press, 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-931361-7 , pp. 120, 286 ( google.de [accessed April 9, 2019]).
  4. ^ The Short French Dictionary, in Two Parts. The 1st English and French, 2nd French and English; According to the Present Use, and Moden Orthography. By Guy Miege, Gent . Thomas Basset at the George near St. Dunstan's Church in Fleet-street, 1690 ( google.de [accessed April 10, 2019]).