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Apple Sauce Cake
One cup of sugar, one of chopped raisins, one-half of butter, two of flour, one of sour apple sauce, one teaspoonful soda, half a teaspoonful each ground cloves, cinnamon and allspice, pinch salt, half a cup chopped walnuts. Cream sugar and butter together, put the soda in the apple sauce, then add to sugar, stir well together, then the flour and spices, raisins and nuts last. Bake in slow oven one hour and ten minutes .
A one-bowl spice cake that leans on applesauce for both moisture and acid — there are no eggs and no other liquid, so the batter is stiff and the crumb dense. A few points on the old conventions before you start.
- The hinge: sour apple sauceThe soda is dissolved in the applesauce because the fruit's acid is the only leavening partner in the recipe. Use unsweetened applesauce made from tart apples; a sweeter, blander sauce will give a less lively rise and can leave a soda taste. A teaspoon of lemon juice stirred into bland sauce sharpens the reaction.
- Soda, not baking powderOne teaspoon of soda for two cups of flour is on the generous side by modern standards. Level it carefully — heaped, it leaves a metallic aftertaste that the spices will not hide.
- "Slow oven"300–325°F. At 300°F the stated hour and ten minutes is about right for a loaf or a deep 8-inch square pan; check at 55 minutes with a skewer, which should come out clean and dry.
- Butter quantity"One-half of butter" means half a cup, 4 oz or one stick, and it should be soft enough to cream properly with the sugar.
- FlourTwo cups of unsifted modern all-purpose flour packs heavier than a period cup of flour would have. Spoon it into the cup and level it, or weigh about 250 g, or the cake will be tight.
- Raisins and nutsToss the chopped raisins and walnuts in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in; in a batter this stiff they otherwise clump at the bottom.
- YieldRoughly a 2-lb cake — one 9x5 loaf or eight to ten servings. It keeps better than most cakes, and the spice flavour is noticeably better on the second day.
Applesauce cake belongs to the large family of American "economy" cakes that get their richness from fruit rather than eggs and their lift from soda reacting with something acidic — the same logic behind sour-milk cakes, vinegar pie and boiled raisin cakes. This is a cake a housekeeper could make from pantry staples and a bowl of leftover sauce from a batch of cooking apples, without spending eggs or cream. The long slow bake suits a cake this dense.