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Farmers' Fruit Cake
3 cups dried apples 2 cups molasses 1 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 cup seeded raisins 1½ cups milk 2 eggs 4 cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 3 teaspoons mixed spices Soak the apples over night; chop and cook slowly with the molasses until tender. Cream the butter and sugar; add the eggs, then the cooked apples and molasses, raisins and milk. Sift the flour, baking powder and spices and beat well while adding to the other ingredients. Pour into a well-greased pan and bake in a slow oven.
A large, heavy, keeping cake built on dried apples stewed in molasses rather than on candied fruit. The apple-molasses step is the whole point and should not be rushed.
- The hinge: cook the apples downSoaked apples simmered slowly in the molasses turn dark, soft and almost jammy, and they read as candied fruit in the finished cake. If they are still chewy when you add them, they will stay chewy through baking and pull moisture out of the crumb.
- Measuring the applesThe 3 cups are dried apple slices measured before soaking. Modern dried apple rings are drier and thinner than old-fashioned home-dried fruit; about 6 oz by weight is a fair reading. Cover generously with cold water overnight, then drain before chopping.
- Slow oven300-325F. A cake this dense and this heavily sweetened with molasses will darken at the edges long before the middle sets if the oven runs hot.
- Pan and timeThe batter fills a 10-inch tube pan or two 9x5 loaf pans. Expect roughly 1 1/2 to 2 hours in a tube pan, a little over an hour in loaves; test with a skewer in the deepest part.
- Mixed spicesPeriod shorthand for a household blend, usually cinnamon-dominant with cloves, allspice, nutmeg and sometimes mace or ginger. Three teaspoons of a modern pumpkin-pie or speculaas blend works; otherwise mix your own with cinnamon at roughly half the total.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will fight the apples. Sorghum syrup, common in some inland farm kitchens, would also suit.
- LeaveningFour teaspoons of baking powder to four cups of flour is about a teaspoon per cup, a conventional dose for a batter this heavy. Sift it thoroughly with the flour and spices so it does not streak.
- KeepingA cake this size will serve a large number. Molasses and cooked fruit make this a cake that improves for two or three days wrapped tightly; it slices far more cleanly cold than warm.
Dried-apple fruit cake belongs to the inland American farm kitchen, where apples were sliced and dried by the bushel each autumn and molasses was the cheap sweetener that lasted the winter. Simmering the reconstituted apples in molasses swells and darkens them until they take on the look and sweetness of the candied citron and currants that a city cook would have bought for a proper fruit cake, at a fraction of the cost, and the trick is common enough in nineteenth and early twentieth century American community cookbooks. Its presence in a general instructional cook book of this period reflects a wider habit of the time: setting a thrifty rural formula alongside the richer party cakes.