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Black Cake
In working on our next book, due out from University of Massachusetts Press this fall, we had some correspondence with the staff of Harvard's Houghton Library on the subject of citron, a fruit that, in candied form, is included in many fruitcakes. Some of the Houghton staff had gotten together and baked a "black cake,"from a recipe used by the great nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson and contained in the Dickinson manuscripts held by the Houghton. They described how they baked it in a blog post, Baking Emily Dickinson's Black Cake. Black cake is a type of fruitcake. Catharine Beecher's recipe for it in her popular 1846 cookbook, is given the name "Fruit Cake, or Black Cake."
Finding Citron