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Dried Apple Fruit Cake
Soak two cups of dried apples over night. In the morning chop and simmer them, until dark, (red or brown), in two cups of Orleans molasses. Let cool and add one cup each of butter and milk, one half cup sugar, three cups of flour, two level teaspoons each of cinnamon, allspice, and cloves, three of baking powder, three eggs, and one-half pound of raisins. (Also, if liked, a cup of currants and a tablespoon of chopped citron.) Bake for two or two and a half hours in slow oven.
A dense, spiced fruit cake that gets its body and colour from dried apples stewed in molasses rather than from candied fruit. The apple-molasses step is the whole point of the recipe and cannot be shortened.
- The hinge: simmer until darkThe chopped soaked apples must cook in the molasses until they turn genuinely red-brown and jammy, as the recipe directs; this takes considerably longer than a brief warming through. Undercooked, they stay pale and fibrous and read as stewed fruit in the crumb instead of the candied-peel texture the recipe is imitating.
- Slow ovenAround 300F. Given the two-hour-plus bake and the molasses, which scorches early, keep to the low end and tent the top with foil if it darkens before the centre sets.
- Orleans molassesNew Orleans molasses was a light-to-medium sugarcane molasses, sweeter and milder than blackstrap. Use ordinary unsulphured baking molasses; blackstrap will make the cake bitter and heavy.
- Dried applesTwo cups of the old-style dried apple rings or slices, not freeze-dried chips and not sweetened dried apple snacks. They roughly double in bulk after an overnight soak; drain them before chopping.
- A cup of butterEight ounces, two sticks. This is a very rich batter for a cake with only half a cup of added sugar, most of the sweetness coming from the molasses and fruit.
- Three teaspoons of baking powderThe original specifies baking powder, not saleratus, and modern double-acting powder behaves much the same here. The batter will be stiff, closer to a thick spoon batter than a pourable one, which is normal.
- Pan and yieldThe recipe gives none. This is roughly a 10-inch tube pan or two 9x5-inch loaf pans, lined with parchment; figure 16 to 20 slices. Test with a skewer at the two-hour mark, as loaves finish well before a single deep cake.
- KeepingLike most molasses fruit cakes, it improves after two or three days wrapped tightly. It will keep a week at room temperature and freezes well.
Dried apple cake belongs to the long stretch of American cookery before cheap year-round fresh fruit, when the autumn surplus was sliced and dried on strings or racks and drawn on all winter. The trick of simmering the reconstituted slices in molasses until they darken was widely printed in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century collections as a frugal stand-in for expensive candied citron and imported dried fruit, and recipes of this type often carry names like "apple fruit cake" or "mock fruit cake" for exactly that reason. The optional cup of currants and single tablespoon of citron here show the compromise plainly: the costly ingredients appear, but in token amounts, while the apples do the structural work. "Orleans molasses" points to the New Orleans cane trade, one source among several in American kitchens alongside West Indian molasses from Porto Rico, Barbados, and elsewhere hbbca — which is precisely why cookbooks bothered to specify the origin — and the long slow bake is characteristic of recipes written for wood- and coal-fired ranges, where a cooling oven after the day's main baking was a resource to be used rather than wasted.