I know, I know. I KNOW. The only thing I can say is that it’s almost over.
Also, you can have cake!
So Election Cake is a tradition that NPR is working real hard to revive. Back in The Day, when the US was a primarily agrarian society, Election Day was functionally a civic holiday, and everyone would troop into town, the men would vote and everyone would eat a lot of food (food as bribery for votes, a tradition now seen in election day bake sales, WHICH MY POLLING PLACE DOES NOT HAVE) (ahem).
I also thought I’d take this opportunity to discuss why Election Day in the US is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. It comes down to archaic timing back in 1792, when it was established that the Electoral College (another topic for another time) would meet on the first Wednesday of December, and that the states needed to hold their election day sometime in the 34 days previous. Why 34 days? I don’t know. Maybe someone does (I’m guessing it has to do with how long one could expect the journey from the further flung states to the capitol – NYC at that point – to take, but I don’t actually know).
Anyway, states used to be able to set their own election day, but early voting states could have an effect on later voting states (kind of like the current primary situation), so in 1845, Congress mandated that every state holds the presidential election on the first Tuesday in November, BUT it was noted that could result in a period longer than 34 days before the Electoral College met. So it was changed to the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
Now, as for why November, and why Tuesday, that question goes back to the US’s agrarian roots. November, because by then most of the harvest is in, so people can afford to take a day to perform their civic duty. And it’s a Tuesday, because it doesn’t involve traveling on the Sabbath, and Wednesday is usually market day. Tuesday is just one of those days where not much is going on.
So now you know. (Smart Bitches, Trashy Books: come for the man titty, stay for the political history.)
Anyway, there are a lot of recipes for election cake, but I went with the one from American Cake, by Anne Byrn. It covers three hundred years of types of cake and gives modern recipes. It’s a beautiful book, and the ONLY complaint I have about it is that she does not give her original sources for each recipe. That’s a specific complaint for my type of nerd, I know, but come on! Pander to the food historians!
For my Election Day party, I will be making Byrn’s variation on Martha Washington’s Great Cake. Martha made it for George when he came home to Mount Vernon to sit underneath his own tree after his two terms were over in 1797. The first peaceful transition of power the US ever had, and a tradition that has endured ever since. I feel like it’s appropriate.
Anyway, the Great Cake is a typical 18th century cake. The recipe that Mount Vernon has is flour, sugar, butter, currants, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and barm (the foamy bit from fermenting booze, which has yeast in it). At this point, baking soda and baking powder haven’t been invented, so leavening comes from yeast in this case.
Byrn’s variation takes from both Martha Washington’s and Martha Parke Custis, which adds eggs (a LOT of eggs, 40 of them), wine, and brandy. Byrn has no barm, but tells you to soak currants in wine wine for two hours. (Also, I will admit that I picked this recipe because election day and booze is a good thing.) (And I might have a line on a source for barm now that I have a friend who works at a brewery. Stay tuned.)
I’m not going to give you the full recipe, because it is most assuredly within copyright, but Byrn’s recipe is butter and sugar and eggs, and flour, with cinnamon, nutmeg and mace (I used cloves because I’m out of mace), and currants and the aforementioned white wine (riesling, because that’s what I like drinking the best. It’s been well documented).
So, ideally, if you are smart, you should read the recipe and not just skim it and leave yourself only BARELY enough time to bake this thing before you have to be at your night job. And then put the currants on to soak in time. For reals. (The currants are soaking to plump up, and the currents also add some flavors to the wine.)
So you cream together the butter and sugar, then add the eggs, and the sift the flour and spices together-
-okay, real talk? I almost NEVER sift my flour. Like, why? But then I was watching the Great British Bake Off, as one does, and Selasi told Mary Berry that he never sifts his flour, and she gave him this look of profound disappointment that I felt IN MY SOUL so I sifted my flour because I was worried Mary Berry would show up and be disappointed with me.
Anyway, you strain out the currants but make sure you save the wine that’s left, then add the flour and wine bit by bit until it’s all mixed in. THEN you add the currents. Now, Byrn calls for a LOT of currants, a whole pound, and I ended up only putting half of that in. (I don’t actually like fruit in my baked goods that much? No, not even blueberries.) Even half the currants was a LOT, and my taste-testers agreed that more would have been basically currents vaguely held together by cake.
It’s really good! It’s a rich, delicious spice cake, and has been getting better as it’s aged. I’m making a new one for actual Election Day, and I encourage all of you to make some sort of cake to get through the day and the night. It’ll help.
It sounds like this is a traditional fruit cake (a load of dried fruit soaked in booze just held together with cake mix)–which is excellent and lasts for months. It is traditional for weddings, baptisms and Christmas in the UK and Commonwealth. Is there something similar in the US now?
Sifting the flour airates(sp?) it. You can do the same by giving it a whirl in a food processor.
So, is the continuing tradition the peaceful transfer of power or does Martha Washington bake them a cake? (If you’re going to be haunted, I’d go for cake ghost.)
I keep thinking about that original recipe. Thirty quarts of flour? Who has a bowl that size? What did they mix it in, the horse trough?
I would so totally shell out many dollars for a book about a cake-baking ghost!!!
Also, American Cake is now on my Wish List.
Seconding the Ghost Baker plot,whilst goggling at the notion of fourty egg cake. That’s got to be one stressed out chicken.
Also, Mary Berry’s unspoken reproof will make better people of us all.
Just added American Cake to my Wish List, too. An Election Cake sounds like a great tradition to revive.
In my new agrarian neighborhood, Election Day Brunswick Stew will be sold on Tuesday at the volunteer fire department and at least one of the churches. Seems like an echo of the old Election Day feasts. Brunswick Stew is a chicken stew with lima beans, corn, and tomatoes cooked for hours in a big kettle. Different cooks add different ingredients, including other vegetables, squirrel, rabbit, or country ham.
Ahh, Brunswick Stew or Booyah or Burgoo is SUCH an American tradition. Most everywhere they make a thick vegetable stew adding whatever meat they have and cook it a long time over an open fire in big iron kettles. Chicken, beef or pork now but in the past they used rabbit, possum, venison, squirrel and/or whatever game was available. Raising money for the fire station or the church or whatever civic cause in the fall is common with the stew and a bake sale as the centerpiece. The Lake Michigan version of this kind of communal food festival is a fish boil in the summer in those same iron kettles with lake white fish, fresh dug potatoes, and sweet corn boiled up and served with butter. YUM! Communal food festivals like these are true American food.
I’m more interested in eating cake than baking it, but thanks very much for the history.
Ha! I don’t think ANYTHING other than copious booze will help me get through election day, but this cake sure does sound good. Thanks for the recipe. Hmm, maybe baking a cake from scratch will keep my mind off things?
I agree with Katrina, in that it sounds like a rich fruit cake. My grandmother’s recipe for a Rich Christmas Cake includes many many eggs too.
I’m English and absolutely love ‘proper’ fruit cakes; I started my Christmas cake last week and it’s sat in tupperware, waiting to be fed with Calvados once a fortnight til Christmas. 😀 Alcohol, lots of fruit, marzipan? I honestly don’t understand the dislike for these sorts of fruit cakes but even in the UK where we’ve got a stronger tradition of this style of cake, it seems to be 50/50 on people liking them.
Okay, this was very interesting. I remember my grandmother making something called a depression cake. It called for raisins and apples but no eggs or milk. Guess they were hard to come by. And my MIL had a cookbook that used “dollop” and “smidgen” and lard.
Linds I’m English too, in my case I don’t really like any cake with raisins, currants and to a lesser extent sultanas, the more there are the less I like it. Now make it with other dried fruit like cherries, blueberries, peel, maybe mangos and dates, then I’m with you 🙂
Carrie did you raise your cakes with yeast or with baking powder?
As for the sifting I think it does depend on the type of cake and is far less important than it used to be. It may make a difference for things like sponges, but not for heavier cakes. Flour did used to be a lot lumpier than it is these days, probably because it was difficult to keep absolutely dry in most households so if you didn’t sift you could end up with lumps of flour in your batter that never got properly mixed in.
Lil they did mix it in something not unlike a horse trough, made of wood and big enough for two people to knead each side. They had a programme that I caught one night showing a group of people including a modern craft baker, an industrial baker, an amateur baker and a baking historian use a preserved bakery from maybe just before WWI. It had a wood fired oven, huge kneeading trough and they had to use barm to raise the bread. Despite all the skilled people involved the initial batch was not good!
I have been told, by an excellent baker (AKA my mother-in-law) that if you don’t want to sift your flour you must measure it by weighing, not scooping. The point of sifting was to get a “standardized” density of flour so when you scooped it, you would get the same amount as the recipe actually wanted, whereas if you measure by weight the volume does not matter one bit.
Besides, a kitchen scale is so wonderfully useful.
And seriously RAISE A GLASS to this election season being O-V-A over at last.
Thanks for the history lesson! I always assumed the elections were held in November because it originally took two months to (a) count all the votes in each city of each state by hand and (b) get those results to the capital (wherever it was at the time) by horseback and (c) allow for any runoffs etc. and have the winners ready to take office on January 1. The more you know…
I have a recipe for Election Cake in my Aunt Sammy’s Great Depression Cookbook that calls for 1 cup of raisins and 1/2 cup chopped figs or dates, but only one egg and 1/2 cup milk, so maybe those were at a premium at the time. (Or maybe it was just that Washington probably had at least 40 chickens and a herd of cows on his plantation but a farmer during the Depression might be lucky to just have one of each.) No booze, because Prohibition. Also it’s made in two stages (first making the “sponge”, ie getting the yeast to rise in a bowl with water and some of the flour and sugar, then later adding the rest of the ingredients and putting it on for a second rise) and it’s made in a tube pan. Interesting to see how the recipe was “modernized”.
Let’s all just write in Justin Trudeau, say I, and let the man take over the whole continent.
Now I’m in the mood to make fruit cake. I don’t sift my flour either. Unless it’s a very delicate cake, I don’t think it matters much. Pie crust is a lot more temperamental. Even if you weigh it, the results will vary depending on the moisture content. That in turn depends partially on the weather, but also on the brand. I happen to think Hecker’s Unbleached is the best all-purpose flour and has the lowest water content.
@ Karin … Me too. I think I’ll make Mary Berry’s fruity banana bread from her baking cookbook for an Election Cake. I use fruitcake mix instead of glazed cherries.
my friend sent me an article from NPR about the cakes and some recipes.
We’ll just wait a few days for my birthday to have chocolate cake.
Because I think I am older than many of your readers I will say that when I was younger I always sifted my flour and then measured it. Then almost overnight that didn’t work anymore. Because of the way flour was being processed it no longer needed to be sifted before being measured. Whether sifting it after measuring it would improve the baked goods is kind of a matter of individual taste. My family couldn’t tell the difference.