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Southern Fruit Cake
1 cupful sugar 1 cupful Crisco 1 cupful molasses 1/2 cupful sour cream 3 cupfuls flour 1 teaspoonful salt 1/2 teaspoonful baking soda 3 eggs 1 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 1 cupful seeded raisins 1/2 cupful currants 1/4 teaspoonful grated nutmeg 1/2 teaspoonful powdered cloves 1/2 teaspoonful powdered allspice Cream Crisco and sugar thoroughly together, then add molasses, cream, flour, soda, eggs well beaten, salt, spices, and fruit. Mix well and turn into Criscoed and papered cake tin and bake in slow oven one and a half hours. Sufficient for one large cake.
A molasses-and-spice fruit cake of the plainer Southern type, leaned on shortening rather than butter because the book was written to sell it. It works as written with minor translation.
- Slow ovenBake at 300-325F. At an hour and a half, a dark molasses batter in a large tin will scorch at anything higher; tent the top with foil if it colors early.
- CriscoStill sold, and the recipe was built around it. Any solid vegetable shortening behaves the same; butter gives more flavor but a slightly drier crumb, since shortening is 100 percent fat and butter about 80.
- "Criscoed and papered"Grease the tin, then line the bottom and sides with parchment and grease that too. For a long slow bake this matters more than usual — the sugar and molasses will weld the cake to bare metal.
- Sour creamIn 1915 this often meant naturally soured raw cream, thinner and sharper than the modern cultured product. Commercial sour cream is a fine substitute; thin it with a spoonful of buttermilk if the batter seems stiff.
- Soda and acidHalf a teaspoon of soda against half a cup of sour cream plus a cup of molasses is the only leavening here. Do not add baking powder to "help" — the cake is meant to be close-grained, not airy.
- Mixing orderThe original dumps flour, soda, eggs and fruit in together. Better results come from whisking the soda and spices into the flour, beating the eggs in before the flour, and tossing the raisins and currants in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- MolassesUse unsulphured mild or full-flavor molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter enough to dominate the spice.
- Tin and yield"One large cake" is roughly a 9-inch tube pan or two 8x4-inch loaf tins; the loaves will be done nearer 60-70 minutes. A skewer should come out clean with no wet crumbs.
- KeepingWrapped tightly, it improves for three or four days as the molasses and spice settle. It is not a brandy-fed Christmas cake and will not keep for months.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks how to use a new product. Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, reached the American market in 1911, and Marion Harris Neil's recipes for its makers specify it in place of butter or lard in nearly everything, down to the verb "Criscoed" for greasing a pan. The cake itself is older than the shortening. A "Southern fruit cake" of this sort — molasses, soured cream, soda, raisins and currants, warm spices, no nuts or candied peel and no liquor — is the everyday cousin of the rich black wedding cake, closer to a gingerbread than to a Christmas cake.