Dundee Cake
It’s Friday and we all need cake. I only need virtual cake, because I have decided to see if I can fit into my clothes for the whole of winter. It’s a daring thought.
This is another of those 1950’s recipes from my grandmother. We used to make Dundee Cake a great deal in the late sixties, but I haven’t seen it anywhere recently. I think it’s time it was revived!
The problem I’ve been noticing recently is that most of you are heading into summer while I’m heading into winter. Dundee Cake is a cake for all seasons. I wish it were a cake for all waistlines as well - I’ll have to trust that my memory will bring me the exact flavour.
Dundee Cake
4 oz butter
5 oz sugar
½ lb flour
3 eggs
2 oz citron peel
4 oz sultanas
2 oz currants
2 oz almonds
½ teaspoon baking powder
a little milk
Grease & line a plain cake tin. Cream butter and sugar, beat in egg one at a time. Pick, wash and dry fruit*. Chop peel and add to the mixture. Sift flour, and powder, and add. Mix in a little blanched almonds and sprinkle on top when mixture is in tin. Bake for 1 hour.
* Australian fruit doesn’t need to be picked and washed and dried these days. There used to be tiny stones and things in the fruit and we used to sit around the table and sort the piles needed for a family cookathon. When a family has four daughters all with a healthy number of friends and when relatives and neighbours will drop in without warning there will always be a need for preparing ingredients.
I’m now trying to remember when we stopped having to check the dried fruit. It was quite early - maybe the early seventies? Please feel free to tell me if you know more than I do about this. Emma W - you live in an important fruit area, do you know anyone who might know?
food hsitory, foodways, Dundee cake, recipe
May 4th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
I remember Dundee cake. One of my aunties used to make it whenever we visited. That’s the lovely thing about food - it so often encapsulates memories of family life.
May 4th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
my mum might know…I’ll have to remember to ask.
On another note, she’s letting you borrow (and possibly keep some but not others) of her cookbooks. I just have to get them to the PO.
May 5th, 2007 at 7:20 am
Dawn - there’s so much overlap between food in Australia and New Zealand historically - it fascinates me.
Amma, please thank your mother from me. I’ll return the loan-books in good condition and will entirely appreciate the others :).
June 4th, 2007 at 6:03 am
[...] Polack presents Dundee Cake posted at Gillian Polack, saying, “Australians tend to have meat pies when we go to the [...]