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Apple-Sauce Cake
1¾ teaspoonful soda 1 cups bread flour I 1 cup light brown sugar ½ cup shortening 1 cup apple sauce 1 teaspoonful salt teaspoonful each mace, clove, and cinnamon Put sugar and shortening in mixing-bowl, add apple sauce, then dry ingredients already mixed and sifted. Beat well, turn into deep pan, and bake in moderate oven about one hour. If liked, one cup of floured raisins may be added with dry ingredients. Butter alone may be used for shortening, or part chicken or rendered beef fat.
A plain one-bowl spice cake that uses up leftover apple sauce; the sauce supplies both moisture and the acid that activates the soda. Mix quickly and get it into the oven.
- OvenA "moderate oven" is usually read as somewhere around 350-375F. In a deep pan an hour is about right; an 8- or 9-inch square or a loaf pan will need the full hour, and a skewer should come out clean.
- Flour quantityThe flour measure as printed is unclear. A cake built on 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup shortening and 1 cup apple sauce normally takes about 2 cups of flour; start there and expect a thick, spoonable batter rather than a pourable one.
- SpicesThe amount is missing from the text, though it calls for the same quantity of each. Something like a quarter to a half teaspoon of each suits this size of cake; clove and mace both dominate quickly, so if you scale the cinnamon up, keep the other two low.
- Bread flourIn this period bread flour was often the general household flour, as distinct from pastry flour. Plain all-purpose flour gives a softer crumb here and is the better choice.
- Apple sauceUnsweetened or lightly sweetened sauce is assumed. If your leftover sauce is sugared, cut the brown sugar back by a couple of tablespoons; a very watery sauce should be reduced first or the cake will be gummy.
- Soda, no baking powderThe single teaspoon of soda relies on the acidity of the apple sauce. Sift it thoroughly with the flour and salt so it does not leave soapy streaks, and bake at once.
- Shortening choicesButter is the obvious modern reading. Rendered beef fat or chicken fat will work, as the recipe says, though both carry flavour into a sweet cake.
- Floured raisinsTossing the raisins in a little of the measured flour keeps them suspended rather than sunk. One cup is generous for a cake this size; three-quarters is easier to slice.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 servings. It keeps well wrapped for several days and is better on the second day, when the spices have settled.
Apple-sauce cake belongs to a family of American fruit-and-spice cakes that lean on an acid puree for lift and moisture, and it turns up frequently in early twentieth-century thrift cookery: a bowl of sauce that has gone slack in the pantry becomes a keeping cake, and the note that chicken or rendered beef fat may stand in for butter may suggest a household saving its drippings. Recipes of this shape sit alongside the eggless, butterless, milkless "war cakes" associated with the 1917-18 food conservation campaigns.