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Dried Apple Fruit Cake
One pint of dried apples, soaked over night, then chopped fine; let them simmer in one cup of molasses a little while; add four eggs, two cups sugar, one cup butter milk, one cup shortening, one tablespoonful soda, one tablespoonful cinnamon, one tablespoonful allspice, one tablespoonful cloves.
A characteristic turn-of-the-century fruit cake that uses stewed dried apples in place of candied peel and currants. As printed it omits both the flour and the baking directions, so it needs filling in before it can be mixed.
- The missing flourWith four eggs, two cups sugar, a cup of buttermilk and a cup of shortening, this batter needs roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups of flour to come together as a cake. The original gives no flour at all; recipes of this kind often left the quantity to the cook's judgement.
- Two fats, not one"One cup butter milk" is buttermilk, the liquid; "one cup shortening" is the fat, which around this date often meant lard or a lard-and-butter mixture. Butter works and tastes better here.
- Dried applesA pint measures roughly 4 to 6 oz of dried rings, depending on how they are cut. Soak overnight in water to cover, drain, then chop fine. Modern dried apples are often treated with sulphur dioxide and stay softer, so an hour or two of soaking may be enough.
- The molasses step mattersSimmering the chopped apples in the molasses is the hinge of the recipe. The fruit absorbs the syrup and takes on a dark, slightly candied character that reads as citron or dried fig in the finished cake. Ten to fifteen minutes over low heat, stirring, then cool completely before it meets the eggs.
- Soda and acidA tablespoon of soda is a great deal by modern standards, but it is balanced against a cup of buttermilk and a cup of molasses, both acidic. Use a level tablespoon and sift it with the flour rather than dumping it into the wet mixture.
- SpicesThree tablespoons of ground spice total. That is assertive but correct for the style; older ground spice lost strength on the shelf, so with fresh jars you may prefer two teaspoons each of allspice and cloves.
- BakingThe original gives no baking directions. Two greased and lined loaf pans, or one 10-inch tube pan, at 325 to 350F. Loaves take about an hour, a tube pan closer to 1 1/4 hours; test with a skewer, as the molasses keeps the crumb dark and moist-looking.
- Yield and keepingAbout two loaves, twenty generous slices. Like most molasses cakes it improves after a day or two wrapped tightly, and it will keep a week at room temperature.
Dried apple cake belongs to the era before reliable winter shipping of fruit, when a household's apples were sliced and strung to dry in autumn and drawn on all winter. Cakes like this one are sometimes called "poor man's fruit cake" because the stewed apple stands in for the imported citron, raisins and currants that made a proper Christmas cake expensive; molasses supplies the dark colour and much of the sweetness that a richer recipe would get from brown sugar. Its appearance in a bride's cookbook is telling. Books of this kind lean heavily on pantry staples and soda-and-sour-milk leavening.