Fig Cake
Two cups of sugar, one of butter, one of cold water, dissolve one teaspoonful of soda; three cups of raisins, chopped
The text as printed breaks off mid-sentence: there is no flour, no egg, no figs, no mixing method and no baking direction. What follows is what can be said about the fragment and how a cake of this type was ordinarily handled.
- The recipe is incompleteIt ends at "three cups of raisins, chopped" — the flour, leavening beyond the soda, spice, eggs and all baking instructions are missing. Anyone wanting a finished cake will need a complete recipe; this page is a record, not a working formula.
- Where are the figsA cake called Fig Cake that lists only raisins may not be a printer's error. Chopped raisins, sometimes stewed dark with spice, were sometimes used to approximate a fig filling or fig-pudding character, and the missing portion of the text may have called for figs in a layer or filling.
- Cup and butter measuresA cup in this period is usually taken as about 8 fluid ounces, and a cup of butter as roughly 8 ounces, or two modern sticks; cup sizes were not yet standardised. Butter was commonly salted, so if you use unsalted you may wish to add about half a teaspoon of salt.
- Soda dissolved in water"one of cold water, dissolve one teaspoonful of soda" means baking soda stirred into the water, not into the flour. Soda alone needs an acid to lift the batter — molasses, sour milk, or the acidity of the fruit — which is another sign the surviving text is missing lines.
- Boiled-raisin styleCakes built on sugar, butter, water and chopped raisins in these proportions are often boiled-raisin cakes: the fruit, sugar, water and butter are simmered together, cooled, then the soda and flour stirred in. If that is what the missing lines described, the mixture should be cool before the flour and soda go in, or the soda will spend itself early.
- OvenNo baking direction survives. For a fruited butter cake of this kind a modern cook would use a moderate oven, around 325-350F, in a lined loaf or tube pan; timing will depend entirely on the missing flour quantity. The fruit and sugar brown fast; tent the top with foil if it colors before the center sets.
- YieldTwo cups of sugar and a cup of butter suggest a large cake, but with the flour quantity missing no pan size or serving count can be given. Fruit cakes of this type keep well wrapped for a week and slice more cleanly on the second day.
Bride's cook books were compiled as starter libraries for new households, and their cake chapters lean heavily on keeping cakes: dense, fruited, butter-and-sugar loaves that survived a week in a tin and could be produced for callers without notice. Dried figs reached American kitchens in pressed blocks and layers, largely from the Mediterranean and, by the late nineteenth century, from California plantings around Fresno, and they were expensive enough that raisins — cheaper, always at hand, and easily chopped to a similar dark stickiness — stood in for them constantly. The chopped-raisin cake boiled with butter, sugar and water belongs to the same economical family as the wartime and Depression-era "boiled raisin cakes" that needed no eggs and little milk, and here the recipe survives only as a broken half-sentence.