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Oberlin Honey Fruit-Cake
1/2 cup butter, 4 cup honey, 1-3 cup apple jelly or boiled cider, 2 eggs well beaten, 1 teaspoonful soda, 1 teaspoonful each of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg, 1 teacupful each of raisins and dried currants. Warm the butter, honey and apple jelly slightly, add the beaten eggs, then the soda dissolved in a in little warm water; add spices and flour and flour enough to make a stiff batter, then stir in the fruit and bake it a slow oven. Keep in a covered jar several weeks before using.
A honey-sweetened keeping cake of the old type, written for a cook who already knew what a stiff fruit-cake batter looked like. Two of the quantities are mangled in the original printing, so read it as a formula rather than a set of measurements.
- The garbled amounts"4 cup honey" against half a cup of butter and two eggs is not a workable ratio; it is almost certainly a broken fraction, though whether 1/4, 3/4 or something else cannot be told. "1-3 cup" of apple jelly is very likely 1/3 cup set with a hyphen. Neither can be recovered with certainty, so treat the honey as the sweetener for a two-egg cake and adjust by feel.
- No flour quantity is givenThe recipe says only "flour enough to make a stiff batter" — the word is repeated in the original, a typesetting slip. Expect somewhere around 2 to 2 1/2 cups for this quantity of liquid; the batter should hold a spoon upright and drop reluctantly, not pour.
- A teacupfulUsually reckoned at somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup in books of this era, smaller than the standard measuring cup, though usage was not consistent. So perhaps 3/4 cup each of raisins and dried currants rather than a full cup.
- Slow ovenNo temperature is given in the original; a slow oven is generally read as somewhere around 300-325F. Honey browns faster than sugar and a dense fruited batter needs long, gentle heat; expect roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours in a loaf tin, tested with a skewer.
- Soda, not baking powderThe single teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the honey and the apple jelly or boiled cider. Dissolve it in warm water as directed and get the cake into the oven promptly -- much of the lift is released soon after mixing.
- Boiled ciderSweet cider reduced to a thick syrup, once a farm staple and now sold by a handful of New England producers. Apple jelly is the recipe's own substitute and works.
- Do not skip the curing"Keep in a covered jar several weeks" is the point of the cake, not an afterthought. Honey cakes are dry and sharp-spiced fresh and turn moist and mellow as the honey draws moisture back through the crumb. Wrap well, keep cool, and leave it alone for at least two weeks.
- YieldOne 8x4-inch loaf, or two small ones, which keep better and give you something to open early.
Honey cakes belong to the older tradition of keeping cakes, made before cheap refined sugar and prized because honey's hygroscopic nature let a loaf sit in a covered jar for weeks or months without going stale. The Oberlin name may point to Oberlin, Ohio, a town whose college and temperance-minded, reform-minded households produced a steady stream of contributed recipes in late nineteenth-century American cookbooks, though the recipe carries no attribution and the name could as easily be a surname or another town of the name; community cookbooks of the era routinely carried a dish under the name of the town or church circle that supplied it. Boiled cider, called for here as an alternative to jelly, was a standard farm sweetener and acidulant in apple-growing regions, and its near-disappearance from kitchens is a fair measure of how much has changed since this recipe was set in type.