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Apple Fruit Cake
One cup butter, two of sugar, one of milk, two eggs, tea-spoon soda, three and a half cups flour, two of raisins, three of dried apples soaked over night and then chopped fine and stewed two hours in two cups molasses; beat butter and sugar to a cream, add milk, in which dissolve soda, then the beaten eggs and flour, and lastly the raisins and apples well stirred in; pour in pan and bake an hour and a half. - Mrs. C. M. Ingman.
A big, dense keeping cake in which stewed dried apples stand in for candied fruit. Everything depends on the apple-molasses mixture, which is really a preserve made a day ahead.
- Start a day earlyThe three cups of dried apple slices must soak overnight in water, then be drained, chopped, and stewed in the two cups of molasses until thick and jammy — the recipe's two hours is not an exaggeration over low heat. Cool the mixture completely before it goes into the batter or the butter will melt out.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. Bake at 325F; at 350F a cake this size and this heavy with molasses will darken at the edges long before the centre sets.
- Pan and donenessThis is roughly a five-pound batter. Use a 10-inch tube pan or two 9x5 loaf pans, lined and greased. An hour and a half suits the tube pan; loaves may want 60 to 75 minutes. Judge by a skewer coming out clean, not by colour, since the molasses keeps it dark throughout.
- Cups and measuresRead all cups as 8 fluid ounces. One cup butter is 8 oz or two sticks; three and a half cups flour is about 15 to 16 oz. Flour of the period varied in strength from modern all-purpose, so hold back a few tablespoons and add them only if the batter will not hold a spoon upright.
- Soda, not baking powderThe single teaspoon of soda is there to react with the molasses, which is acidic; that is the whole leavening system. Do not substitute baking powder, and mix and pan the batter promptly once the soda meets the wet ingredients.
- RaisinsTwo cups of raisins is about 10 oz. Toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink; if yours are very dry, a brief soak in hot water, well drained, keeps them from robbing moisture from the crumb.
- SpiceMrs. Ingman gives none. Cinnamon, cloves and allspice, a teaspoon or so in total, are in keeping with similar cakes if you want it closer to what most readers expect.
- Yield and keepingAbout 20 generous slices. Like most molasses fruit cakes it improves after two or three days wrapped tightly, and will keep a week or more in a cool place.
Dried-apple fruit cake belongs to a family of American "mock" fruit cakes that used what a farm pantry actually held — dried apples, molasses and raisins — in place of the citron, currants and candied peel of the English cake. Before commercial cold storage, apples were sliced and dried by the bushel in late autumn, and stewing them down in molasses produced something close enough in colour, sweetness and chew to pass for preserved fruit. The Dixie Cook Book, like the Buckeye books it grew out of, was assembled from contributed household receipts, and the attribution to Mrs. C. M. Ingman is typical of the method: a named cook vouching for a cake she baked regularly. Soda-and-molasses leavening was long established in home baking, and it continued in use alongside commercial baking powder rather than being neatly displaced by it.