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Fruit Cake (II)
Mrs. J. D. Odell.
One cup butter, two cups of sugar, one cup of molasses six cups flour, one cup sour cream or milk, three eggs, one teaspoon soda, one pound raisins, one pound currants, one-fourth pound citron, three nutmegs, cloves and mace one tablespoon each. This will make one large cake or two small ones.
A plain molasses fruit cake of the kind kept in a crock through the winter. The original gives no oven temperature and no baking time, which is normal for a book written when cooks judged their own stove.
- Oven and timeBake at 325F, low and slow, so the dense fruited batter sets before the outside darkens. One large cake in a 9-10 inch tube or deep 9-inch pan will need roughly 1 1/2 to 2 hours; two smaller loaves, about an hour to an hour and a quarter. Test with a skewer in the centre.
- Three nutmegs is not a typoA whole nutmeg grates down to roughly two to three teaspoons, so this calls for something on the order of two to three tablespoons of nutmeg plus a tablespoon each of cloves and mace. That is a heavily spiced cake by current taste; halving the spice gives something closer to a modern fruit cake without hurting the structure.
- Soda and sour creamThe teaspoon of soda is raised by the acid in the sour cream or sour milk and by the molasses. If you are using fresh milk rather than genuinely soured cream, add a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice to the cup and let it stand ten minutes; the molasses provides some acid on its own, so the difference may be smaller than with a plainer batter.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the table molasses of the period. Treacle works if that is what you have.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in tubs at holiday time or from baking suppliers. Candied orange and lemon peel substitute directly if citron is unavailable; a quarter pound is about 3/4 cup chopped.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small dark ones, not fresh red or black currants and not raisins. Rinse and dry them if they are dusty, and toss all the fruit with a spoonful of the measured flour to keep it suspended.
- Flour measureSix cups of unsifted all-purpose flour is roughly 1 lb 10 oz. Period cups may have run a little smaller, so hold back half a cup and add it only if the batter will not hold the fruit.
- Yield and keepingSomething like 6 lb of cake, from close to 7 lb of ingredients. Wrapped well, it improves over a week or two; the sugar, molasses and dried fruit make it a keeper.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks distinguish between the grand "black" or "wedding" fruit cake, loaded with brandy and a dozen eggs, and the plainer molasses fruit cake like this one, which stretches three eggs and a cup of butter across six cups of flour and two pounds of dried fruit. The economy shows in the details: molasses in place of part of the sugar, sour milk and soda for lift, and currants, raisins and a little citron rather than the imported glace fruits of a fancier version. Cakes of this sort are often described as being baked in autumn and kept covered for slicing through the cold months. The recipe belongs to the subscription or charity cookbook tradition, in which contributions were printed under the contributor's name -- which is why it carries Mrs. Odell's name and almost no instructions: it was written for a reader who already knew how to make a cake.