From Wembledon/London England a set of books dated 1860 – 1928, this recipe is dated 1915.

Eltringham Cake

30 June 1915

Violet, Very Large Cake

1 lb. flour

½ lb. castor sugar

1 lb. sultana’s washed or

½ lb. sultana’s & ½ lb. raisins stoned

½ lb. butter

¾ pint milk

2 fresh eggs

1 teaspoon bi carbonate of soda

Rub butter finely into the mixed sugar & flour, add the fruit, whisk the whole eggs, pour in slowly stirring with a spoon.  Then beat up with ½ pint of the milk cold, stirring thoroughly, finally add the soda previously melted in the ¼ pint milk made hot.  Bake in buttered tin in moderate oven for 1 ½ hour.  This makes a very large cake, half the quantities for a small cake. 

Castor Sugar – Also known as Baker’s Sugar: It is not very commonly used in the U.S. and may be very hard to find.  Castor sugar is a superfine grain about halfway between your regular table sugar and powdered or confectioners’ sugar.  It is used in England for cakes and cookies; you may be able to find it online, but the price may be prohibitive.   You can make your own with a little work, by adding it to a blender and processing it to a finer granule, but be careful, if you go too far it will become powdered sugar which is too fine a grain.  A suggestion on Bob’s Red Mill Website is to keep a towel over the top of the blender so the dust made in the process will not escape into the air and go everywhere. 

It is the perfect sugar for meringues, as it is a finer grain so it blends better and make the meringue lighter and fluffier. 

This cake is written on a piece of paper that is embossed with; The Vicarage, Fernhurst, Haslemere. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernhurst

“Fernhurst is a village and civil parish in the Chichester District of West Sussex, England, on the A286 Guildford to Chichester road, 3 miles (4.8 km) south of Haslemere. The parish includes the settlements of Henley Common, Kingsley Green and Bell Vale, lies within the boundaries of the South Downs National Park and is surrounded by hills.”

Eltringham is a town (hamlet) in Northumberland, on the south bank of the River Tyne. 

https://co-curate.ncl.ac.uk/eltringham-northumberland/

https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/place/9105

“In 1870-72, John Marius Wilson’s Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales described Eltringham like this:

ELTRINGHAM, a township in Ovingham parish, Northumberland; on the River Tyne, 5 miles E of Corbridge. Acres, 320. Pop., 159. Houses, 28.”

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