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German Fruit Cake
One and one-half cups of flour, one teaspoon butter, rubbed together; pinch of salt, one teaspoonful baking powder , milk to make batter thin enough to spread (a little thicker than cake). Put in a layer of fresh fruit all over the top and sprinkle with sugar.
This is a plain fruit kuchen batter rather than a cake in the American sense: a thick, biscuit-like dough spread in a pan, covered with raw fruit, and baked. The original gives no pan, no oven heat and no time, so those have to be supplied.
- The butter is almost certainly a mistakeThe butter may be a misprint -- one teaspoon to a cup and a half of flour gives almost no fat, which would bake up dry and dull, though some plain kuchen bases really are this lean. If you want a richer base, a tablespoon or two rubbed into the flour is a defensible reading of the intent.
- Consistency is the hinge"Thin enough to spread, a little thicker than cake" means a stiff drop batter that you push into the pan with a spatula rather than pour. Add the milk a few tablespoons at a time; roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup gets there. Too thin and the fruit sinks and the base turns to pudding.
- Pan and thicknessSpread the batter about 1/2 inch deep in a greased 8- or 9-inch square or round pan. Deeper than that and the top fruit finishes long before the middle sets.
- Oven heatBake at 375F for 30 to 40 minutes, until the edges pull from the pan and a skewer in the batter (not the fruit) comes out clean. A hotter oven, 400F to 425F, also works if the layer is thin, but the sugared fruit will darken faster.
- Baking powderPowders of this period were often single-acting tartrate types rather than modern double-acting, so the lift may have behaved differently. If you find one teaspoon per 1 1/2 cups flour gives too little rise, 1 1/2 teaspoons is a safe increase. Get it into the oven promptly once mixed.
- The fruitThe recipe says only "fresh fruit". Halved and pitted plums, damsons, apricots or sliced apples all suit it; stand plum halves cut side up in close rows so the juice pools rather than runs. Very wet fruit such as ripe peaches or berries should be sugared and drained first, or the base will be soggy.
- SugarThe recipe sweetens only the top. Two to four tablespoons over the fruit is usual, more for tart plums, and a little cinnamon is traditional. The batter itself stays plain, which is what makes this bread-adjacent rather than dessert-sweet.
- Yield and servingOne 8- or 9-inch pan cuts into six to nine squares. Best warm on the day it is baked, plain or with unsweetened whipped cream; a cake of this kind stales quickly and is not a keeper.
What this brief entry describes is the everyday German fruit sheet cake -- Obstkuchen -- that German-speaking immigrants carried into American kitchens and that turns up in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century community cookbooks as "German fruit cake," "kuchen" or simply "fruit cake" with no dried fruit in sight. The older form used a yeast-raised dough; the baking-powder version here is the shortcut that commercial chemical leavening made possible from the middle of the nineteenth century onward. The whole thing is flour, a little fat, milk and whatever fruit was ripe that week, requiring no fruit preserving, no long rising and no creaming of butter and sugar. Recipes written this briefly assume a cook who already knows what a spreadable batter looks like, which is why the pan, the heat and the time were not thought worth stating.