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Apple Sauce Cake
1/2 pint (I cup) sour apple 1 teaspoonful powdered cin- 4 sauce namon 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1/4 teaspoonful grated nut- 1/2 lb. (I cup) sugar 2.14 lb. (1/2 cup) butter or lard 1 saltspoonful salt 1 meg 3 tablespoonfuls warm water 12 7 ozs. (1¾ cups) flour 7 1 cupful Sultana raisins 1 cup nuts 4 2 1/2 teaspoonful powdered cloves 2 or 2 Cream the butter and sugar together, add the salt, spices, raisins, cleaned, the soda dissolved in the warm water, apple sauce, and the flour. Beat all thoroughly together and pour into a buttered and floured shallow casserole.
Bake in a moderate oven for forty-five minutes.
A plain spiced applesauce cake of the sort that turns up in early twentieth-century casserole books, where the same earthenware dish served for stews and for cake. The measurements are given twice, in weight and in cups, which resolves most of the ambiguity.
- The casserole is the panA casserole here is an earthenware or glazed baking dish, used uncovered as a cake pan. A shallow one of about 8 to 9 inches, buttered and floured, is the modern equivalent; a metal 8-inch square pan behaves much the same, though it will brown faster at the edges.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350F; the recipe itself gives no temperature. Forty-five minutes is right for a shallow dish; a deep one will need longer and should be tested with a skewer at the centre.
- Sour apple sauceThis means unsweetened applesauce made from tart cooking apples, not the sweetened jarred kind. Its acidity is what the baking soda reacts with, so sweetened applesauce will give a flatter, sweeter cake. One cup is called for.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon. That is the whole seasoning of salt in the cake.
- Butter or lardHalf a cup, that is 4 ounces. The recipe allows either; butter gives more flavour and both work. Cream it properly with the sugar before anything else goes in, since there are no eggs here to carry air.
- Soda in warm waterDissolving the soda in three tablespoons of warm water before it meets the batter distributes it evenly and prevents the bitter yellow streaks that dry soda leaves. Once it hits the applesauce the reaction starts, so get the batter into the dish and into the oven without delay.
- The nutsA cup of nuts is listed among the ingredients but the method never mentions them. Chop them and fold them in with the raisins.
- Cleaning the raisinsSultanas of the period arrived with stems and grit and needed washing and picking over. Modern packaged raisins need nothing; if they are dry, a brief soak in hot water and a thorough drain improves them.
- YieldAbout eight to ten servings. It keeps well for several days wrapped, and like most applesauce cakes it is better on the second day.
Applesauce cake belongs to the family of thrift cakes that lean on fruit pulp for moisture and sweetness and on baking soda, rather than eggs, for lift. The acid in tart applesauce reacting with soda was a well-understood trick long before commercial baking powder became universal, and the same logic underlies sour-milk and molasses cakes of the same era. Recipes of this type are often said to have spread through American and British household books in the late nineteenth century and again during wartime shortages, when eggs and butter were scarce and apples were not. Its appearance in a casserole cookbook may reflect a familiar attraction of the genre: a single glazed earthenware dish that could go from oven to table, saving both fuel and washing-up, and could be pressed into service for baking as readily as for braising.