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Family Fruit Cake
3 cupfuls of raisins--1 pound. 4 of currants--1 pound. 1 of sugar--6 ounces. 1 of butter--6 ounces. 1 molasses--12 ounces. 2 eggs. 1 cupful of sour milk. 1 teaspoonful of soda. 4 large cupfuls of flour--18 ounces. Having prepared the fruit, make the butter soft mix it and the sugar, molasses, eggs and sour milk together in a pan, and beat well; mix the soda in the flour, put that in and beat again. Dust the fruit with flour, stir in, bake in a mold or shallow pan.
Another cake of the same sort can be made by mixing fruit in the sponge ginger-bread.
An unusually helpful old recipe in that it gives weights alongside the cup measures, so there is no guesswork about how densely the author packed a cup. What it does not give is an oven temperature or a baking time.
- Trust the weights, not the cupsThe weights and cup counts do not map onto a modern cup uniformly: 4 cups of flour at 18 ounces works out to about 4.5 ounces per cup and a cup of sugar at 6 ounces is light, while a cup of molasses at 12 ounces is close to the modern figure. Work from the weight wherever one is given; the sour milk is given only by the cup.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic, and it is there to react with the soda. Buttermilk is the standard substitute; a cup of whole milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes also works.
- SodaOne teaspoon of baking soda is the whole leavening, activated by the sour milk and the molasses. Sift or whisk it thoroughly through the flour as directed rather than dropping it into the wet mixture, or you will get bitter streaks.
- Preparing the fruitRaisins of this period arrived on the stem and with seeds, and currants came gritty; "having prepared the fruit" means stemming, seeding and washing, then drying well. Modern packaged dried fruit needs none of this, but it should still be tossed in a little of the measured flour so it does not sink, as the recipe directs.
- OvenNothing is stated. A heavy fruited batter of this kind wants 325F, low enough that the molasses and sugar do not scorch before the centre sets.
- TimingExpect roughly 45 minutes to an hour in a shallow pan, and 1.5 to 2 hours in a deep tube or loaf mould. Test with a skewer in the centre; the fruit will read moist regardless, so look for clean crumb rather than nothing at all.
- MolassesTwelve ounces is a substantial proportion, and it should be ordinary unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the nineteenth-century product and will dominate the cake.
- YieldAdding the listed weights gives roughly 5.5 pounds of batter and fruit: enough for a large tube mould or two to three loaf tins. It keeps for a week or more wrapped tightly.
- The closing suggestion"Sponge ginger-bread" is the light, soda-raised molasses gingerbread found elsewhere in books of this type, not a sponge cake. Folding the same fruit into that batter gives a spicier, lighter version of the same idea.
This is a family fruit cake in the plain American sense rather than the brandied, almond-pasted Christmas cake of the English tradition: no spirits, no candied peel, no long maturing, and the richness carried by molasses and sour milk instead of a pound of eggs. Cakes leavened with soda and sour milk became common in American kitchens through the second half of the nineteenth century, once cheap saleratus and then reliable baking soda were widely sold, and they let a cook produce something substantial without the labour of beating a dozen eggs to a foam. The dual measurement style here, cups with the weight appended, lets the same recipe serve a cook working by the scale and one working by the cup. The closing line about mixing fruit into the sponge gingerbread is an economy of the same kind: one batter, two products.