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Raw Apple Fruit Cake
4 raw apples chopped fine 1½ t nutmeg, also cinnamon 1 C raisins ½ C flour 1/2 C walnut meats 1 C sugar 1 large T butter 1 t soda 1 egg and yolk of another 3 T boiling water Cream butter and sugar.
Add egg and yolk. Dissolve soda in boiling water. Add flour. Put in ungreased pan. Double the amount and it fills an angel food pan. Bake very slowly.
Mrs. Ida McKibben.
A dense, single-layer spice cake leavened only with soda, in the terse shorthand of a church cookbook that assumed you already knew how cake worked. The list is complete but the method leaves out the last third of the assembly.
- The nutmegThe printed page gives 1½ teaspoons nutmeg, and also cinnamon, which is what our text now reads. That is a generous but reasonable amount of spice for a cake of this size; scale the nutmeg back to ½ teaspoon if you prefer it milder.
- Add the fruit and nuts yourselfThe method never mentions the apples, raisins or walnuts. Fold them in after the flour, all at once; the chopped raw apple supplies nearly all the liquid in the batter, which will otherwise look impossibly stiff.
- "Bake very slowly"In period usage a slow oven is usually taken to mean somewhere around 300 to 325F, and "very slowly" suggests the lower end. A wet, sugary apple batter with only soda to lift it needs a long gentle bake or the outside sets before the middle cooks. Reckon on roughly 50 to 60 minutes in an 8-inch square pan, and appreciably longer — perhaps 70 to 90 minutes — for the doubled quantity in a tube pan, testing rather than trusting the clock.
- Soda in boiling waterDissolving the soda in 3 tablespoons of boiling water is a common step in recipes of this vintage, presumably to distribute it evenly through a stiff batter. The recipe does not say when to add it; add it to the creamed butter and sugar and mix quickly, since the acid in the apples will start the reaction, and get the cake into the oven promptly.
- Ungreased panThe recipe says ungreased and gives no reason. Run a knife around the edge while the cake is still warm and let it cool in the pan, or line the base with parchment if you would rather not gamble.
- ApplesThe recipe says chopped fine rather than grated; use a firm tart apple that holds its shape. Four medium apples gives somewhere around 3 to 4 cups — a generous ratio to 1½ cups of flour, which is what makes this a moist keeping cake rather than a light one.
- Egg and yolkOne whole egg plus one extra yolk, so you will have a white left over. The extra yolk is there for richness in a cake with only one large tablespoon of butter.
- YieldThe single quantity should fill an 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan and cut into 9 to 12 squares; the recipe itself says only that a doubled batch fills an angel food pan. Like most moist fruit cakes it should keep a few days well wrapped.
Raw apple cakes belong to a large family of American "one-egg" cakes built to stretch a small amount of butter and sugar with fruit, and they are often said to have multiplied in community cookbooks at a time when sugar and shortening were dear. The word raw in the title is doing real work: it distinguishes this from the more common apple cake made with cooked applesauce. Recipes of this kind travelled by name — a church or ladies' aid collection printed the contributor's name beside her dish, so that Mrs. McKibben's cake was identifiable at every supper in the parish. The compressed style here, with no mixing order for the fruit and no oven temperature beyond "very slowly," is typical of the genre: these books were written by cooks for cooks they knew, in kitchens where a wood or early gas range gave you feel rather than numbers.