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Domestic Fruit Cake
Two cups dried apples soaked over night, in the morning chop fine and boil one hour in 1 cup of molasses, then add: 1 cup sugar 1 cup sweet milk 1 cup butter 1 bowl raisins, or more if wanted rich, also currants, etc. 2 eggs 4 cups Gold Medal flour 1 heaping teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon (each) cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, cloves, ginger and allspice
A dense molasses-and-spice loaf that uses stewed dried apples where a richer cake would use candied peel. The original gives no pan, no oven and no baking time, so those are the gaps to fill.
- The hinge: cool the apple mixtureThe chopped apples boiled an hour in molasses come out near jam consistency and very hot. Let the mixture cool to lukewarm before the eggs and creamed butter go in, or the eggs will scramble and the butter will separate.
- Oven and timeBake at 325F. Two greased and lined 8x4-inch loaf pans take about 1 hour 15 minutes; a single 10-inch tube pan takes closer to 1 hour 45 minutes. Test with a skewer at the centre — the molasses keeps the crumb dark, so colour tells you nothing.
- Dried applesTwo cups of dried apple slices, loosely packed, is somewhere around 4-6 oz depending on how they are cut. They swell noticeably on an overnight soak, roughly doubling in bulk; drain them before chopping and boiling, and keep a little of the liquid back in case the molasses mixture threatens to catch.
- "Sweet milk"Fresh whole milk, as opposed to the soured milk or buttermilk that other recipes of the period call for. Since the leavening here is soda alone, the acid comes from the molasses, not the milk.
- SodaA heaping teaspoon is about 1 1/2 level teaspoons. This is a lot, but with molasses as the only acid in the batter it has plenty to react with. Sift it with the flour rather than dumping it in.
- "1 bowl raisins"Unquantifiable as written. Two cups of raisins plus a cup of currants suits this quantity of batter; the recipe invites more 'if wanted rich', though past about four cups of fruit in total the loaf will struggle to carry it.
- SpicesSix teaspoons of ground spice in four cups of flour is assertive by modern standards and correct for the style. Ground mace is the one likely to be missing from a modern rack; nutmeg is the closest substitute, though it is sweeter and less floral.
- ButterOne cup is two sticks, 8 oz. Cream it with the sugar in the usual way rather than adding it to the hot apple pot.
- Yield and keepingSomething over 4 lb of cake, or two generous loaves. Like other molasses fruit cakes it improves after two or three days wrapped tightly, and keeps a week or more at room temperature.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was promotional literature from the Washburn-Crosby Company of Minneapolis, the milling firm that later became part of General Mills, and its recipes served to sell flour to households that baked regularly. "Domestic" in the title most likely points to home-supplied rather than imported ingredients: a richer fruit cake wanted citron, candied peel and currants bought in, while dried apples were something a farm family could dry themselves each autumn. Stewed with molasses and heavily spiced, they take on a dark, chewy, faintly sticky character that stands in for candied fruit, and the substitution was familiar enough in nineteenth-century American cookery that it turns up under names like apple fruit cake and dried apple cake in community collections. The heavy hand with cloves, ginger and allspice belongs to the same economy.