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Opening Up Space: A Lovely Technofeminist Opportunity

"Plum Cake" Recipe Alternatives

Plum Cake was quite popular in nineteenth-century England and Scotland, and found in many a cookbook or recipe book from the time. One 1820s reconstruction recipe was similar to this one found in the Women's Recipe Book:

"Plumb Cake"
"Take four pound of fine flour well dried, four pound of fresh butter, two pound of loaf sugar pound and sift fine, quarter of an ounce of mace, the same of nutmeg, to every pound of flour put eight eggs, wash four pounds of currants pick them well & dry them before the fire, blanch 1 pound of sweet almonds & cut them length ways very thin, one pound of citron, one pound of candied orange, the same of candied lemon, half a pint of brandy, first work the butter in your hands to a cream, then beat in your sugar a quarter of an hour, beat the whites of the eggs to a strong froth, mix them with your sugar and butter, beat your yolks half an hour at least, mix them with your cake, then put in your flour, mace and nutmeg, keep beating it well till your oven is ready, put in your brandy & beat in your currants and almond lightly, tie three sheets of paper round the bottom of your hoop to keep it from running out, rub it well with butter, put in your cake & lay your sweetmeat in three layers with cake between every lay. After it is risen and coloured, cover it with paper before your oven is topped up, it will take three hours baking in a good oven."

It's also remained popular until now, with new iterations of the recipe appearing in modern cookbooks, including A Year in a Scots Kitchen by Catherine Brown, which transcribes a 1736 recipe by a woman identified as "Mrs. McLintock", as follows:

‘Take a peck of flour and two pound of butter; rub the butter among the flour, till it be like flour again; take 12 eggs, a lb of sugar, beat them well together; then take a mutchkin of sweet barm, half a mutchkin of brandy, then your flour with the beaten eggs and sugar, and put in the barm and brandy and work all well together; then take ten lb of currants, 2 lb cordecidron [lemon peel], 2 lb of orange peel, 2 lb blanched almonds, cut, half an ounce of cinnamon, half an ounce of nutmeg and cloves, half an ounce of carvey-seed [caraway]; take off the fourth part of the leaven for a cover, and work the fruits and spices among the rest, then put on the cover, and send it to the oven.’

Brown identifies Scottish plum cake as the fore-runner to the modern Scots "Black Bun", which adds raisin and ginger to the recipe and folds the mixture into a bun-like pastry instead of a cake.

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Cosmopolitanism, National Identity, and Crossing National Lines Both in the past and now, food and cooking is intrinsically linked to culture and national identity. In Victorian England, good cooking was considered a sign of civility and class, and international cuisines, especially French and German cuisines, were delighted in. This Women's Recipe Book is certainly a sign of that cosmopolitan sense. As mentioned in the introduction to the text, the recipes in the text come from a variety of cultures, though mostly Western European, and include American, Scottish, French, and Spanish-style recipes. One recipe marks itself as "African", and is one of the few distinctly non-European entries in the recipe book. The recipe book's inclusion of recipes from a variety of different national and cultural backgrounds is certainly indicative of Victorian England's cross-cultural contact, and the ways in which it assimilated and communicated with non-English cultures and trade, especially as industrialization became more widespread.

Even as the English began to view themselves in relation to the world as part of a cultural trade, nationalist and racist views grew in popularity. While recipes from other countries became more widespread, the cultural connections to food could also be used to draw lines between 'us' (the English, and some White Western Europeans) and 'them' (the non-Western Other), and this is demonstrated by some of the widely used cooking texts at the time. One of the most famously used cookbooks at the time was Mrs. Beeton's The Book of Household Management, by a woman cook named Isabella Beeton, published in 1861. It was written with the middle-class and housekeeping in mind, and included ways to cook, bake, set a table, clean properly, and more. In chapter 40, "Dinners and Dining", the book touched on the topic of race, culture, and cooking in a way that is recognizably racist. She wrote:
"Man, it has been said, is a dining animal. Creatures of the inferior races eat and drink; man only dines. It has also been said that he is a cooking animal; but some races eat food without cooking it. A Croat captain said to M. Brillat Savarin, "When, in campaign, we feel hungry, we knock over the first animal we find, cut off a steak, powder it with salt, put it under the saddle, gallop over it for half a mile, and then eat it." Huntsmen in Dauphiny, when out shooting, have been known to kill a bird, pluck it, salt and pepper it, and cook it by carrying it some time in their caps. It is equally true that some races of men do not dine any more than the tiger or the vulture. It is not a dinner at which sits the aboriginal Australian, who gnaws his bone half bare and then flings it behind to his squaw. And the native of Terra-del-Fuego does not dine when he gets his morsel of red clay. Dining is the privilege of civilization. The rank which a people occupy in the grand scale may be measured by their way of taking their meals, as well as by their way of treating their women. The nation which knows how to dine has learnt the leading lesson of progress. It implies both the will and the skill to reduce to order, and surround with idealisms and graces, the more material conditions of human existence; and wherever that will and that skill exist, life cannot be wholly ignoble."
Isabella Beeton's views on the cultural importance of dining were not uncommon for the era, and the manner in which she dehumanizes other races, using their differing (or rather, imagined) methods of dining as an excuse, was unfortunately also all too common. Victorian England had no problem invading other countries for their ample resources, including food and spices, and this manifested in the idea that the English were capable of using these resources far better than the races she wrote do not 'dine any more than the tiger or the vulture'. This "Orientalism" created a perception of the enlightened, civilized Occident (or West), and the backwards, uncivilized, barbaric Orient (or East), ultimately positing the "European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures" (Said).

This manifested heavily in the Victorian perceptions of imported ingredients and items, which were often considered healthy or useful, as long as they were not heavily in use by or associated the people of the original culture. Take, for instance, laudanum - or rather, tincture of opium, which appears in this recipe book and was considered a useful curative substance for a variety of medical issues. Opium sale was not regulated in Victorian England until 1868, when only pharmacists were allowed to sell the substance. But, as time went on, opium became more and more associated with foreign production, especially Chinese production:
Eventually, "opium became associated with Chinese opium dens; in particular, white women were thought to be at risk of being corrupted by foreigners", and the ban on opium and laudanum as an addictive substance in 1920 was led by The 1874 Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, which was "created specifically to campaign against Britain’s involvement in the opium trade with China" (Ng). While the ban on laudanum usage was entirely justified, the Orientalizing (Said) of the product contributed heavily to its danger in the eyes of the public sphere. The public and political associations between laudanum and a 'foreign' invasive substance heavily contributed to its eventual complete ban, even for medical purposes.