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Dried Apple Cake (Also Called "Farmer's Fruit Cake")
2 cups dried apples 2 cups molasses 1 cup butter 2 cups brown sugar 2 eggs (well beaten) 1 cup sour milk 4 cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon cassia 1 teaspoon allspice Nutmeg to taste 2 teaspoons soda Soak apples overnight in water. In the morning, simmer in molasses 1 hour, then add the butter. When cool, add brown sugar, well-beaten eggs, the sour milk, the flour, cassia, allspice and a little nutmeg, also the soda. A tried and true recipe.
A spice cake in the old farmhouse mould: no baking instructions at all, and a batter volume that will overwhelm a single tin. Read the notes on the apples and the soda before you start.
- The hinge: simmering the apples in molassesThe hour in molasses is what makes this cake work — the dried apple pieces swell, soften and candy themselves, standing in for the raisins and citron of a proper fruit cake. Skip or shorten it and you get hard leathery flecks running through the crumb. Chop the soaked apples to raisin size before they go in the pot.
- CassiaCassia is the bark sold in North America as ordinary ground cinnamon. Use 1 teaspoon of supermarket cinnamon and no substitution is needed.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Buttermilk is the closest replacement, cup for cup; failing that, add 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar to a cup of whole milk and let it stand 10 minutes. The acid is structural here — it is what activates the soda.
- Soda and molassesTwo teaspoons of soda is a lot by modern standards, but it is doing double duty against both the sour milk and the acidity of the molasses. Use fancy or cooking molasses rather than blackstrap, which is harsher in flavour. Sift the soda with the flour rather than dumping it in, or you will get bitter dark streaks.
- The flourFive Roses was a Canadian flour milled from hard spring wheat, stronger than modern all-purpose. Plain all-purpose flour works and gives a more tender cake; measure the 4 cups by spooning into the cup and levelling, not by scooping.
- Temperature and timeNo oven is specified, as was normal in household cookbooks of the period. This is a dense, dark, sugar- and molasses-heavy batter, so bake it slow: 325F, testing from 55 minutes. A hotter oven will set the crust long before the centre cooks.
- Yield and pansThis makes roughly 12 cups of batter — far too much for one tin. Divide between two 9x5-inch loaf pans, lined and greased, or use a large tube pan. Expect 24 or more servings.
- KeepingLike most molasses cakes it improves after a day or two wrapped tight, when the spice settles and the crumb moistens. It keeps a week at room temperature and freezes well.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, and it was assembled largely from recipes sent in by housewives who used the flour — hence the closing line, "A tried and true recipe," which reads like a note appended by the contributor. Dried apple cake belongs to a whole family of North American cakes built on the fruit a farm actually had in late winter: apples cut in rings and dried on strings in the autumn, molasses from the barrel, and milk soured on the shelf rather than thrown out. The alternative name is the point of the dish — simmered in molasses, the dried apple turns dark, translucent and sweet enough to pass for the candied peel and preserved fruit of a Christmas cake, at a fraction of the cost. Cakes of this kind are generally traced to the same thrift that produced vinegar pie and mock mince meat, where a technique substitutes for an ingredient nobody could afford.