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Poor Man's Fruit Cake
One and a half cups brown sugar, two of flour, one each of butter and chopped raisins, three eggs, three table-spoons sour milk, half tea-spoon soda, half cup blackberry jam. This is excellent as well as economical. - Mrs. J. S. Robinson,
A compact butter cake leavened only by soda and sour milk, with jam standing in for the expensive spice-and-citron mixture of a true fruit cake. The original gives no pan, no oven and no time, so those are the gaps to fill.
- Method the original assumesNineteenth-century cake directions often took creaming for granted: beat the butter and brown sugar until light, add the eggs one at a time, then alternate flour with the sour milk. The soda can go in dissolved in the milk or sifted with the flour, and the jam and raisins are best folded in last.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means milk that has soured or clabbered naturally. Buttermilk is the usual modern substitute; three tablespoons is a very small amount of liquid and not much acid for half a teaspoon of soda — the jam is acidic as well, and it carries much of the moisture.
- Cup sizesA cup in this period is usually taken as roughly 8 fl oz, close enough to use modern measures. Two cups of flour to one cup each of butter and raisins gives a very rich, dense batter.
- FlourHousehold flour of the period was generally less consistent than modern all-purpose. If the batter seems slack after the jam goes in, an extra two or three tablespoons of flour is within the spirit of the recipe.
- RaisinsRaisins of the period generally still had seeds and were chopped by hand; modern seedless raisins need only a rough chop, and tossing them in a spoonful of the measured flour keeps them from sinking.
- OvenThe original gives none; a moderate oven, about 325–350°F, suits it. A greased and floured 8- or 9-inch loaf or square pan takes roughly 50 to 65 minutes; test with a skewer, as the jam keeps the crumb moist and can read as underbaked.
- YieldOne loaf, about 10 to 12 slices. It keeps several days wrapped.
"Poor man's" cakes are a whole genre in American community cookbooks, and the name generally signals the same thing: what has been left out. A proper fruit cake called for currants, citron, candied peel, brandy, mace and anywhere from a half dozen to a dozen eggs. This version substitutes what a farm kitchen already had, with a half cup of blackberry jam doing the work of the spices and preserved fruit, and three eggs instead of a dozen. Jam cakes of this kind are especially common in Southern collections, where blackberries were gathered wild and put up by the gallon. The Dixie Cook-Book, like most of the compiled household books of its era, printed contributions over the names of the women who sent them in, which is why Mrs. J. S. Robinson's endorsement appears with it.