Fig Loaf Cake
1 cup butter or shortening
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 cups brown sugar
½ teaspoon ground cloves
4 eggs
1 teaspoon nutmeg
3 cups flour
1 cup water
2 teaspoons baking-powder
½ pound finely cut figs
¼ teaspoon salt
2 cups chopped raisins
Cream the butter or shortening and add the sugar. Add the eggs, well beaten. Mix and sift the dry ingredients and add alternately with the water. Add figs and raisins, dredged with a little of the flour. Bake in a greased loaf pan in a slow oven (320° F.) about two hours.
A dense, spiced fruit loaf of the pound-cake family, given here with the ingredient list set in two columns that have run together in transcription. Read it as two lists before you start.
- Untangling the ingredient listThe left column is 1 cup butter or shortening, 2 cups brown sugar, 4 eggs, 3 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/4 teaspoon salt. The right column is 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves, 1 teaspoon nutmeg, 1 cup water, 1/2 pound finely cut figs, 2 cups chopped raisins.
- The oven number is the pointThe recipe itself specifies a slow oven at 320F. This is a heavy, sugar-and-fruit-laden batter; at 350F the outside sets and darkens long before the middle is done. Keep it low and accept the two hours.
- Pan sizeThis makes a very large quantity of batter, over four pounds of it, more than a standard 9x5 loaf pan will hold. Divide between two pans, or use one deep 10-inch tube pan, and reduce the time accordingly -- start testing at 75 minutes for divided loaves.
- FlourTurn-of-the-century household flour was softer than modern bread flour. All-purpose is the right substitute; measure by spooning into the cup and levelling rather than scooping, or the loaf turns dry.
- Dredging the fruitThe instruction to dredge figs and raisins with a little of the flour is not decorative. It keeps the fruit suspended instead of sinking to the base during two slow hours in the oven. Take the flour from the three cups already measured.
- The figsDried figs, stemmed and cut small — half a pound is about 1 1/2 cups chopped. Hard, leathery figs benefit from a soak in hot water for ten minutes, then draining and patting dry, before they are cut and dredged.
- Testing and keepingA skewer in the centre should come out with moist crumbs but no wet batter; the top will crack, which is normal for the style. Cool fully in the pan. Like most fruit loaves it slices better and tastes better on the second day, and keeps a week wrapped.
Butterick, the dress-pattern company, published household books as an extension of its magazines for women, and their cake chapters reflect what an American kitchen could reliably stock in the years around the turn of the century and into the 1910s: brown sugar, dried fruit, and the trio of cinnamon, clove and nutmeg that stood in for expensive fresh flavourings. A "loaf cake" in this period means a spiced, fruited butter cake baked in a loaf pan clloser to a plain fruitcake than to anything iced, and made without the brandy and long ageing of a Christmas cake. Figs earn their place because dried figs were to be had on grocery shelves at a price that let them be chopped into everyday baking rather than served whole as a treat from domestic growers, whose large-scale Smyrna-type production in Fresno only began to succeed from about 1900, and still in large part from imports from Turkey. The recipe's confident "slow oven (320F)" is a small marker of its date: cookbooks had begun to translate the old vocabulary of slow, moderate and quick into numbers, though how many readers had an oven they could actually set to a temperature is less clear.