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Apple Cake
One cup sugar and one-half cup butter creamed together, one and one-half cups of sour apple sauce in which stir a teaspoon of soda and one and one-half cups of flour. Spice to taste and add raisins if desired.
— Mrs. Celia S. Chadwick
A one-bowl eggless applesauce cake of the kind that turns up in every American community cookbook of the period. The receipt assumes you know what to do with a batter once it is mixed, so the missing pieces are pan, oven and time.
- The hinge: soda into warm sauceThe hinge: soda into the sauce -- The teaspoon of soda is stirred into the applesauce, not the flour, so it can react with the acid of the sour apples before it meets the batter. Mix the sauce and soda, let it foam, fold in the flour and get it into the oven promptly — the lift is chemical and short-lived.
- "Sour apple sauce"Tart cooking apples, cooked down with little or no sugar. Modern jarred applesauce is sweetened and mild; use unsweetened sauce, and if it tastes flat, a teaspoon of cider vinegar or lemon juice restores the acidity the soda needs.
- No eggs, and none neededThere are no eggs in the receipt; the flour and the moist apple carry it. Do not add eggs to "improve" it — expect a dense, moist result rather than a light one.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F. In an 8-inch square pan or a standard loaf tin, 40 to 50 minutes; a skewer should come out clean and the top spring back.
- Batter consistencyOne and a half cups of flour to the same volume of sauce gives a very loose batter. It is correct as written, but expect something between a cake and a pudding; if you want a firmer crumb, an extra quarter-cup of flour is within the spirit of the receipt.
- "Spice to taste"Cinnamon, with a little clove and nutmeg, suits this kind of cake — roughly a teaspoon of cinnamon and a quarter-teaspoon each of the others for this quantity. No salt is listed; a pinch is worth adding.
- RaisinsAbout three-quarters of a cup. Toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink through the wet batter.
- YieldOne modest cake, eight to nine squares. It keeps better than most butter cakes and is generally considered better on the second day.
Applesauce cake belongs to the family of eggless, milkless cakes that American home bakers relied on whenever eggs were dear or the hens had stopped laying — the same logic that later produced the wartime "war cake." Its leavening depends on the reaction between saleratus or baking soda and the acid of unsweetened sour apples, a pairing that predates reliable commercial baking powder and survived long after it. That the receipt calls specifically for sour apple sauce is the tell: sweeter dessert apples are less acidic and would have given less lift. A cake like this in a church or society cookbook is orchard economy in print, a use for the tart windfalls and the crock of sauce put up in autumn, contributed under a neighbour's own name.