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Economical Fruit Cake
1/2 cup butter 2 cups brown sugar 1 pound raisins 1 pound currants 1/2 pound citron 1 cup molasses 1 egg d 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon cloves Pinch of salt 1 cup warm coffee 3 cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder Wash the fruit thoroughly and put it in a warm place to dry. Beat the butter and sugar; add the fruit, molasses, egg and spices; then the flour and coffee alternately and the baking powder last. Line a deep baking pan with well-buttered paper; pour the batter into it and bake in a slow oven about three hours.
A one-egg fruit cake stretched with coffee and molasses instead of butter and eggs — cheap by the standards of its day, and still a sound formula. A few points on translating it.
- Ignore the last lineThe trailing "1 cup sugar, 1/4 cup butter, 1 egg" belongs to whatever recipe followed on the page. It has no place in this batter, and the stray "d" after the egg is a typesetting artefact.
- A slow ovenAround 300F (150C). At three hours that suits a dense fruit batter; any hotter and the outside risks setting and scorching on the molasses sugars before the middle is done.
- Pan and lining"A deep baking pan" means a loaf or a deep round tin. This is a large batter; two 9x5 loaf pans, or a deep tin of comparable total capacity, will hold it. Line with buttered parchment rather than the buttered paper the recipe calls for, and let the paper stand above the rim as a collar.
- Washing the fruitNineteenth- and early twentieth-century raisins and currants arrived gritty and often stemmed by hand. Today's fruit needs no washing; if you do rinse it, dry it thoroughly or the extra water will slacken the batter.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold today in jars around the winter holidays. Candied orange or lemon peel substitutes without complaint. Chop it small.
- Order of mixingBaking powder going in last, after the liquid, is a period habit rather than a necessity. Sifting it with the flour gives more even lift; if you follow the original order, mix only until it disappears.
- DonenessThree hours is a guide, not a rule. A skewer into the centre should come out clean of batter, though it may pick up a little fruit; the cake will also pull very slightly from the paper. Start checking at two and a half hours.
- Yield and keepingA large cake, several pounds of it. Wrapped well, it improves over a week or two as the molasses and spice settle; unlike a brandy-fed Christmas cake it has no alcohol to preserve it, so refrigerate beyond that.
"Economical" in a cake title of this era generally signals fewer eggs and cheaper sweetening, and the substitutions here suggest which luxuries were being dodged: one egg rather than the half-dozen or more of a rich fruit cake, brown sugar and molasses instead of white, coffee in place of the spirits of a wedding or Christmas cake, and baking powder rather than a long yeast rise. Cakes of this pattern circulated under names like poor man's fruit cake, boiled fruit cake and war cake, and such recipes were common during wartime sugar and butter rationing. What is not economised is the fruit -- two and a half pounds of raisins, currants and citron against three cups of flour.