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Apple-Sauce Cake
⅓ cup butter or shortening
1 teaspoon soda
1 cup sugar
Pinch of salt
1½ cups thick sweetened apple
Spices to taste sauce
1 cup raisins
2 cups flour
Cream butter or shortening and sugar together, then add the apple sauce. Mix and sift flour, soda, and spices, then the raisins. Mix well. Bake in well-greased loaf pan at 380° F. for about forty-five minutes.
The ingredient list has been set in two columns and reads scrambled: it is ⅓ cup butter or shortening, 1 cup sugar, 1½ cups thick sweetened apple sauce, 2 cups flour, 1 teaspoon soda, a pinch of salt, spices to taste, and 1 cup raisins. The method is sound once you untangle it.
- The hinge: soda, not baking powderThe only leavening is the teaspoon of soda reacting with the acid in the apple sauce. Sift it thoroughly through the flour and get the batter into the pan promptly — the lift begins the moment the wet and dry meet.
- The oven number380°F is an oddly precise figure by modern habits; set a modern oven to 350°F and start checking at 40 minutes; the loaf is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back.
- Apple sauce"Thick sweetened" matters. Commercial unsweetened sauce is looser and less sweet; if that is what you have, drain off any free liquid and expect a slightly plainer cake. Chunky sauce also works, though the crumb will be less even.
- Spices to tasteA workable combination for an apple-sauce cake is about 1 teaspoon cinnamon with ½ teaspoon each of cloves and nutmeg. Allspice can stand in for the cloves.
- RaisinsToss them with a spoonful of the measured flour before they go in so they do not sink. Plumping them in hot water for ten minutes first keeps them from drawing moisture out of the crumb.
- No eggsThe recipe calls for none; the apple sauce supplies moisture and body. The result is dense and keeps well rather than light.
- Pan and yieldEnough batter for roughly one standard 9x5-inch loaf. Grease well, and lining the base with parchment helps, as the sugar and fruit make it prone to sticking. Let it cool in the pan 10 minutes before turning out, as it is fragile while hot.
- KeepingBetter on the second day. Wrapped in foil it holds for the best part of a week, and the spices settle and deepen.
Apple-sauce cake belongs to a family of American "economy" cakes that lean on fruit purée to stretch eggs and fat — the same logic that produced eggless, milkless, butterless cakes and boiled raisin cakes. Apple sauce was a staple of any household that put up apples in autumn, and using it in a cake both stretched the butter and supplied the acid needed to set off baking soda. The absence of eggs also makes such a cake sturdy enough to travel in a lunch pail or a parcel, which is often said to be why versions of it turn up so often in church and community fundraising cookbooks.