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Apple Fruit Cake
One cup butter, two of sugar, one of milk, two eggs, tea-spoon soda, three and a half cups flour, two of raisins, three of dried apples soaked over night and then chopped fine and stewed two hours in two cups molasses; beat butter and sugar to a cream, add milk, in which dissolve soda, then the beaten eggs and flour, and lastly the raisins and apples well stirred in; pour in pan and bake an hour and a half. - Mrs. C. M. Ingman.
A dense molasses-and-fruit loaf of the type nineteenth-century cooks called a "fruit cake" whether or not it contained candied peel. The dried apples are the whole point, and the recipe gives no oven temperature.
- The apples are the hingeThree cups of dried apple slices soaked overnight, chopped, then stewed two hours in two cups of molasses is not a step to shorten. The fruit absorbs the syrup and breaks down until it reads as citron or preserved peel rather than as apple; undercooked, it stays fibrous and the cake tastes flatly of molasses.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; the book assumes a wood range. A moderate oven, around 325F, suits it: a cake this heavy and sugary is liable to darken at the edges at higher heats before the center is set.
- Pan and yield"Pour in pan" suggests a single large pan; a 10-inch tube pan or two 9x5 loaf pans will hold it. The batter comes to roughly 12 cups and will give 16 to 20 thin slices.
- TimingAn hour and a half suits one large deep pan. In two loaf pans start checking at 55 minutes. Test with a skewer in the center; the fruit stays moist, so look for absence of wet batter rather than a dry skewer.
- Soda and molassesThe teaspoon of soda is neutralized by the acid in the molasses, not by the milk. Do not substitute a light syrup or honey for the molasses without adding an acid, or the cake will taste soapy and stay pale.
- Cool the apple mixtureThe stewed apples must be cool before they go into the batter, or the butter will melt and the crumb will turn greasy.
- RaisinsTwo cups by volume is about 10 oz. Toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink into the very wet batter.
- KeepingWrapped tightly, this improves for several days and keeps a fortnight in a cool place. The molasses and sugar do the preserving.
Dried apple fruit cake was a familiar economy in inland American households before candied citron, currants and peel were reliably available in winter, and it turns up in community cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s under names like "poor man's fruit cake" and "apple fruit cake." Stewing dried apples in molasses until they darken was understood as a way of standing in for expensive preserved fruit. This receipt carries the name of the woman who contributed it, as many entries in compiled subscription cookbooks of the period do. The absence of any oven instruction is typical: a cook working a wood range judged heat by hand and by the browning of a scrap of flour or paper, and no printed number would have helped her.