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German Fruit Brod
Stew separately one pound dried apples and two pounds each of apricots, prunes, and pears, and when quite done mix together, adding two pounds raisins and a pound each of chopped citron and nuts. Also add one pound sugar, one-half teaspoon cloves, and one teaspoon each of allspice, anise, and cinnamon. Set a dough with flour and plenty of yeast but dampen only with the juice cooked out of the fruit.
Let rise, and bake slowly two hours or more.
This is a Swabian-style dried-fruit loaf scaled for a farmhouse: nearly ten pounds of fruit before the flour is even mentioned. Read it as a formula rather than a recipe, and halve or quarter it unless you want four or five large loaves.
- The hinge: liquidThe only liquid permitted is the syrup cooked out of the fruit, so stew the fruit in enough water that you finish with a generous amount of juice, and strain it off before mixing. Cool it to lukewarm before it meets the yeast, and hold some back to adjust the dough at the end.
- No flour quantity is given"Set a dough with flour" leaves the most important measure unstated. For this weight of fruit expect somewhere in the region of 3 to 4 pounds of bread flour; work toward a stiff, barely tacky dough, since the fruit will release more moisture as it stands.
- "Plenty of yeast"In a recipe of this kind that would likely have meant a cake of compressed yeast or a cup of liquid barm. For a quarter batch, two teaspoons of instant yeast is ample; the sugar and heavy fruit slow the rise regardless, so allow two to three hours and expect only modest lift.
- Bake slowlyNo temperature is given; a slow oven is conventionally read as somewhere around 300 to 325F. Two hours suits a large, dense loaf; check for an internal temperature near 200F, and tent the top with foil once it colors, since the fruit sugars scorch before the center sets.
- Prunes and dried apricotsBuy pitted prunes, or pit them after stewing. Sulphured apricots hold their color and tartness better than unsulphured in a mix this sweet.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold near the holidays or from baking suppliers. Candied orange and lemon peel substitute directly; ordinary mixed peel is a weaker but workable stand-in.
- Nuts and aniseWalnuts or hazelnuts are traditional. Use whole anise seed, lightly crushed, not star anise and not extract.
- Yield and keepingThe full batch is very large: the fruit and nuts alone come to eleven pounds before any flour, so four or five loaves would each be well over two pounds, and smaller loaves in greater number are easier to bake through. Baked this dense, the bread improves after three or four days wrapped in cloth then foil, and slices best cold and very thin.
Fruit bread of this kind is the German Früchtebrot, known in Swabia and Baden as Hutzelbrot or Schnitzbrot — Hutzeln being dried pears, Schnitze the dried slices of apple and pear that gave the loaf its body. It belongs to the winter end of the year, when the fruit put up in autumn was still the only fruit in the house; by long-standing custom the loaves were associated with St. Thomas's Day and eaten through Christmas, and they are said to have been carried as gifts to neighbors in some districts. What distinguishes it from an English fruitcake is the method visible here: it is a yeast bread, leavened and slow-baked rather than enriched with butter and eggs, and moistened only with the fruit's own cooking liquor. Its appearance in an American collection may reflect the German-speaking households of Pennsylvania and the Midwest, whose dried-fruit baking passed into general American cookbooks under the loose label "German."