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Spiced Fruit Cake
Laura Thomson. 1 C sugar 2 eggs 2 T butter 1 C sweet milk 2 t baking powder 2 C flour 1 t vanilla 1 pkg. mincemeat 1/2 C walnut meats 1/2 C raisins 2 t cinnamon 1 t nutmeg 12 t allspice 1/2 t cloves Cream sugar and butter, add eggs well beaten. Break one package mince meat, add nutmegs and raisins; mix well. Add all spices and milk. Mix well together. Sift flour, baking powder and add to batter. Mix again, put in loaf-cake tin. Bake in moderate oven.
A church-supper loaf cake built on a brick of dry mincemeat, which does most of the work. Two of the printed quantities are clearly typesetting slips, so read the list carefully before you start.
- The allspice is a typo"12 t allspice" cannot be right; it matches the pattern of the other spices and is almost certainly 1/2 teaspoon. Twelve teaspoons would be a quarter cup of allspice in a two-cup-flour cake.
- "Nutmegs" means nut meatsThe method says "add nutmegs and raisins," but the ingredient list calls for 1/2 cup walnut meats. Nutmeg appears separately at 1 teaspoon. Add the walnuts and raisins with the crumbled mincemeat.
- A package of mincemeatThis means condensed dry mincemeat sold as a brick, roughly 9 ounces, of the sort still sold in some supermarkets around the holidays. It is broken up and used dry here, not reconstituted. Jarred wet mincemeat is not a substitute at this ratio; it would add close to a cup of extra liquid.
- Sweet milkOrdinary whole milk. The term distinguished it from sour or buttermilk, which would have called for soda instead of baking powder.
- Moderate ovenAbout 350F. A loaf pan of about 9 by 5 inches, greased and floured, needs roughly 50 to 65 minutes; test with a skewer in the centre, as the fruit keeps the crumb moist and can read as underdone.
- Mixing orderThe dry mincemeat absorbs milk as it stands, so add the flour promptly once the milk goes in and get it into the oven. Overmixing after the flour toughens what should be a tender cake crumb.
- Yield and keepingOne loaf, twelve to fourteen slices. Like most spiced fruit loaves it improves after a day wrapped tightly, and slices more cleanly cold.
Condensed mincemeat in a dry brick was a commercial convenience product widely available in American groceries from the late nineteenth century onward, and it turned a preparation that had once meant weeks of putting up suet, apples, spices and spirits into a single grocery item. This is a community cookbook recipe, contributed under a cook's name.