Home › Recipes › Apple Fruit Cake
Apple Fruit Cake
1½ even teaspoonfuls The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda. 2 cups dried Apples, 3/4 cup Butter, ¾ cup sour Milk, ¾ cup Raisins, 1. 1½ cup Molasses, ¾ cup Sugar, teaspoonful Cinnamon and Allspice.
Soak the apples over night. Draw off the water in the morning and add the molasses. Boil until commencing to thicken, then add the butter, sugar, sour milk, soda and raisins. Use sufficient flour to make a stiff batter. Spice. Two or three eggs may be added. You can bake this cake or steam it.
A dried-apple molasses cake of the sort baked before fresh fruit was available year round. The instructions assume a cook who can judge batter by eye, so the flour is left to you.
- The fractionsSeveral quantities print oddly: read "34 cup" as 3/4 cup and the soda as 1 1/2 even teaspoonfuls. The numeral before "teaspoonful Cinnamon and Allspice" has dropped out, so the spice is open; about a teaspoon each suits this amount of batter.
- Soda and sour milkThe soda is the leavening and it works against the acid in the sour milk and molasses. Modern buttermilk is the direct substitute for sour milk; ordinary milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar per cup also works. Do not use sweet milk, or the cake will taste of soda.
- Dried applesUse unsulphured dried apple rings or slices, not freeze-dried chips. Two cups dry will swell to roughly double after an overnight soak, and the softened fruit is then stewed in the molasses until it thickens into a dark jam.
- Flour"Sufficient flour to make a stiff batter" is left to the cook; start at around 3 cups of all-purpose and add more as needed. Aim for a batter that drops heavily from the spoon rather than pours; too loose and the fruit sinks.
- Cool the fruit firstThe recipe does not say so, but it is worth letting the apple and molasses mixture cool off the heat before the soda and eggs go in, or the soda may spend itself early and the eggs curdle.
- BakingThe recipe gives no oven temperature; 350F is a reasonable modern setting, in a greased tube pan or two loaf pans, 50 to 70 minutes depending on the pan. The molasses browns the surface long before the centre sets, so test with a skewer rather than by colour.
- SteamingThe steamed version goes into a greased covered mould set in a pan of simmering water, about 2 to 2 1/2 hours. It comes out darker, moister and closer to a pudding than a cake.
- Yield and keepingMakes one large cake, 12 to 16 slices. Like most molasses cakes it improves after a day wrapped tightly, and the flavour deepens over three or four.
Dried apples were the standard winter fruit in nineteenth-century American households, strung or spread on trays after the autumn harvest, and cakes built on them appear throughout the period's baking. Stewing the apples in molasses rather than water gives the dark, chewy fruit that stands in for candied peel and currants in a fruit cake proper, at a fraction of the cost. The recipe comes from one of the small booklets issued by the makers of Arm & Hammer baking soda, given away with the product from the late nineteenth century onward. The pairing of soda with sour milk and molasses was an ordinary chemical leavening of the day.