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Light Fruit Cake
To Fig Éclair mixture add one-half cup raisins seeded and cut in pieces, two ounces citron thinly sliced and cut in strips, and one-third cup walnut meat cut in pieces. In making mixture, reserve one tablespoon flour to use for dredging fruit.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the Fig Éclair mixture from earlier in the cake chapter, a plain creamed butter batter. Everything below concerns handling the fruit and baking a batter that has been weighted down with it.
- You need the base recipeThe Fig Éclair mixture is given elsewhere in the book; without it this page is only the fruit addition. A plain rich butter cake batter will accept these quantities of fruit.
- The flour dredge is the hingeThe reserved tablespoon of flour is tossed with the raisins, citron and walnuts before they go in. Dry, floured fruit stays suspended; unfloured or damp fruit sinks to the bottom in a band and sticks to the pan.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded and cut in pieces" reflects a period when raisins arrived with seeds still in them. Modern seedless raisins need only chopping, and dark or golden both work; golden suits the pale batter better.
- CitronCandied citron, the thick peel of a large lemon-like fruit, is still sold at holidays but is often hard to find. Two ounces is about a third of a cup once cut into strips. Candied lemon or orange peel substitutes acceptably, though it is sweeter and less resinous.
- Why "light"Light fruit cake means a pale batter with no molasses, dark sugar or heavy spice, not a small amount of fruit. Do not add the spices you would expect in a Christmas fruit cake unless you want a different cake.
- OvenThis page gives no baking instruction; follow the base mixture's. Batters weighted with fruit generally take longer than plain cake of the same size, so test with a skewer in the center rather than trusting the clock.
- Line the panThe sugar in the citron and raisins scorches against bare metal. Butter the pan and line the bottom and sides with parchment.
- Yield and keepingYield depends on the base mixture, which is not given here. Wrapped tightly, cakes of this kind keep well for a few days.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks commonly divided fruit cake into "dark" and "light" — the dark one built on molasses, brown sugar, spice and currants, the light one a plain butter cake carrying raisins, citron and nuts. This entry belongs to the second sort, and its form tells you as much about the book as about the cake: the method here is to give one thoroughly worked out base mixture and then hang a family of variations off it, so that a single batter becomes fig éclairs, light fruit cake and other things by addition alone. Flouring fruit before adding it to a batter was already established practice by this date. Citron was long a fixture of the American holiday pantry and has since retreated to a few weeks of shelf space in December.