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Cheap Fruit Cake
Cream well together 1 cupful of brown sugar and a scant ½ cupful of butter, and beat in ¼ of a teaspoonful of salt, 1 teaspoonful of cinnamon, a slight grating of nutmeg, 1/2 teaspoonful of cloves and 1 cupful of seedless raisins. Into 1 cupful of thick apple sauce made with tart apples and unsweetened, sift 1 tablespoonful of bakingsoda. To the creamed ingredients add 1 cupful of flour, the foaming sauce and as much more flour-about 1 cupful-as may be needed to make a thick batter. Turn into a loaf pan lined with greased paper and bake in a moderate oven from fifty minutes to an hour, according to thickness.
An eggless, milkless applesauce loaf that stands in for a fruit cake at a fraction of the cost. The leavening is a single reaction: soda stirred into acidic apple sauce, which foams and must go into the batter at once.
- Work fast at the sauce stageSift the soda into the apple sauce only when the creamed butter and sugar and the first cup of flour are already combined and the pan is lined. The foam collapses within a minute or two, and with no eggs in the batter there is nothing else lifting the loaf.
- The soda quantityOne tablespoon of soda to roughly two cups of flour is far more than modern practice uses; the usual ratio is about a teaspoon of soda per cup of unsweetened apple sauce. At the printed amount expect a soapy, faintly metallic aftertaste and a coarse crumb unless the apple sauce is very tart indeed.
- Moderate ovenAbout 350F (a moderate oven is generally reckoned 350-375F). Fifty minutes to an hour suits a loaf pan of ordinary size; test with a skewer at 50 minutes.
- Apple sauceIt must be unsweetened and genuinely tart, since the acid is what drives the soda. Commercial sweetened sauce will leave the cake cloying and underleavened. Thick means thick enough to mound on a spoon, not runny.
- Lining the panGreased paper means parchment now. A heavy fruit loaf of this kind sticks badly, and the sugar-and-raisin edges scorch if the paper does not come up the long sides.
- Salt and spiceThe salt is a quarter teaspoon. The spicing is generous by modern standards but appropriate; the cinnamon and cloves are doing the work that candied peel and brandy do in a proper fruit cake.
- Flour and batterAdd the second cup of flour a few spoonfuls at a time. You want a thick batter that drops heavily from the spoon, not a dough.
- Yield and keepingOne loaf; roughly ten slices, depending on the tin. Like most applesauce loaves it should be better after a day well wrapped, and the sauce keeps it moist for several days.
Applesauce cake belongs to the family of thrift bakes that multiplied whenever eggs, butter and dried fruit were dear: the sauce supplies moisture, acidity for the soda, and a good deal of the sweetness, so one can get a spiced, dark, keeping loaf with half the usual butter and no eggs at all. Why such a loaf should be called a fruit cake is a matter of speculation rather than record, though it is often observed that a true fruit cake meant currants, citron, candied peel and often spirits, all of them expensive imports, where here a cup of seedless raisins and a heavy hand with cinnamon and cloves stand in for the lot. Recipes of this shape appear widely in American household cookery through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and eggless and butterless formulas of a similar kind were printed as a patriotic duty during wartime rationing.