Fruit Cake
Add to the above recipe 2 cups of seeded raisins or mixed fruit. Have fruit rubbed together with a half cup of flour. 1 cup New Orleans Mo-
This is not a standalone recipe but a variation printed under a preceding cake, and the text breaks off mid-word. Read it as a set of amendments rather than a formula you can follow on its own.
- The missing baseEverything here depends on "the above recipe," which is not on this page. Without it there is no flour, fat, sugar, egg or leavening quantity, and none of that can be honestly guessed. Pair these instructions with the plain cake recipe they were printed beneath, or with a comparable spice-cake base.
- "New Orleans Mo-"The line is cut off at the page break, almost certainly New Orleans molasses, meaning full-flavoured cane molasses, not blackstrap and not the sulphured supermarket kind if you can avoid it. The text says to add the cup to the base recipe; whether the original expected any reduction of the base's sugar or liquid to compensate is not stated here.
- Molasses and sodaIf the base recipe is raised with baking soda, the molasses is doing double duty as flavour and as the acid that activates it. Substituting honey or golden syrup would then change the rise, as neither is acidic enough to react fully with soda.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" here means the seeds have been removed by hand from muscat-type raisins, which is what most raisins were before seedless varieties took over. Modern raisins are already seedless; use them straight from the box.
- Rubbing fruit with flourThe half cup of flour tossed with the fruit keeps it suspended rather than sinking to the bottom of the pan. The page does not say whether this half cup comes out of the base recipe's flour or is extra; taking it from the base measure is the safer reading, since adding it on top will stiffen the batter.
- OvenThe page gives no oven instruction. As modern practice, a dark, molasses-heavy fruit cake is usually baked slow, around 300 to 325F, for a long time; at the higher temperatures common for plain cakes the sugars in the molasses and fruit can scorch at the edges before the centre sets.
- Pan and donenessLine the pan with parchment and check with a skewer at the centre; the fruit makes surface colour a poor guide. A loaf of this type keeps well wrapped for a week and slices more cleanly on the second day.
The recipes here are built around the chemistry of baking soda: molasses, sour milk, buttermilk and brown sugar all supply the acid that soda needs. The fruit cake here is the everyday American kind, a dark spiced loaf stiff with raisins, rather than the brandy-fed, almond-pasted Christmas cake of the English tradition. "New Orleans molasses" was a grade name in general use through the nineteenth century for cane syrup shipped out of the Gulf ports, and it was generally understood in the trade to signal a lighter, sweeter product than the West Indian molasses sold alongside it. The instruction to seed the raisins by hand dates the page as much as anything else: seeding was tedious enough that it is often mentioned in cookbooks until seedless grape varieties became the commercial standard for drying.