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Fruit Cake with Bread & Chocolate
1 lb. butter. 1 lb. brown or white sugar ½ eggs 1 lb. bread flour 4½ lbs. seeded raisins 1 lb. citron 1/2 lb. candied pineapple ½ lb. candied cherries This amount makes two large cakes. 2 C sugar 1 C butter 4 eggs 1 C strong coffee 1 C molasses 4 C flour Mrs. R. Folger. 1 glass grape jelly ½ pt. fruit juice 1 t salt 1 T cinnamon 1 T nutmeg 1/2 T each allspice and cloves 12 t soda 2 t melted chocolate
Two separate fruit cake formulas have been run together here, and neither carries a method — community cookbooks of this era assumed the cook already knew how a fruit cake was built. What follows is what the ingredient lists actually tell you.
- Reading the abbreviationsC is cup, T is tablespoon, t is teaspoon, lb. is pound, pt. is pint. A "glass" of jelly is a standard jelly tumbler, roughly 8 ounces.
- The first list is a black fruit cakeOne pound each of sugar and flour against twelve eggs and better than seven pounds of fruit means the batter is only a binder. There is no fat and no leavening listed; the eggs do all the lifting and the fruit carries the moisture.
- Seeded raisinsSeeded raisins were muscats with the pits removed, sticky and much larger than modern seedless. Ordinary dark raisins substitute pound for pound, though the flavour is milder.
- CitronCandied citron peel, from a thick-rinded citrus grown for the purpose. It is sold at Christmas in most supermarkets and year-round from baking suppliers; candied lemon and orange peel stand in acceptably.
- OvenA cake this dense wants a slow oven, 275-300F, for three to four hours in deep tins lined with several thicknesses of paper. Anything hotter sets and scorches the outside long before the middle is done.
- Testing and storingJudge by a skewer coming out clean and by the cake pulling slightly from the tin, not by colour, which is dark from the start. These keep for months wrapped and boxed, and improve for the first few weeks.
- The second formulaSugar, butter, eggs, coffee, molasses and flour — makes a softer spiced cake; the jelly, fruit juice, spice and soda printed after the contributor's name may belong to it or to a further recipe. Twelve teaspoons of soda is out of proportion to four cups of flour; a teaspoon or so is the usual amount with that much molasses and coffee.
- YieldThe first list is stated to make two large cakes — figure two 9- or 10-inch tube pans, or four smaller loaves.
Fruit cake in an American church cookbook of this vintage is likely a Christmas and wedding cake, presumably made in quantity in November and left to mature. The proportions here — a pound of flour to seven pounds of fruit — descend from the English plum cake tradition, in which the flour and eggs exist only to hold the dried fruit together, and the expense of the candied peel and cherries was the whole point of serving it. The second formula, leaning on coffee, molasses and jelly rather than butter and eggs, belongs to the thriftier strain of "poor man's fruit cake" that circulated widely in the Midwest; recipes of that kind multiplied in community collections because they gave the dark, spiced result without the cost.