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Southern Fruit Cake
1 cupful sugar 1 cupful Crisco 1 cupful molasses ½ cupful sour cream 3 cupfuls flour 1 teaspoonful salt ½ teaspoonful baking soda 3 eggs 1 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 1 cupful seeded raisins ½ cupful currants 1/4 teaspoonful grated nutmeg ½ teaspoonful powdered cloves ½ teaspoonful powdered allspice Cream Crisco and sugar thoroughly together, then add molasses, cream, flour, soda, eggs well beaten, salt, spices, and fruit. Mix well and turn into Criscoed and papered cake tin and bake in slow oven one and a half hours.
Sufficient for one large cake.
A molasses-and-spice fruit cake from Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook, leavened entirely by soda reacting with sour cream and molasses. It is a heavy batter and wants a long, low bake.
- Slow ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "slow oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 300-325F. Keep it low: any hotter and the molasses and sugar will darken and the outside will set long before the dense centre is cooked.
- The 1½ measurements are unreliableThe 1½ measurements may be misprints -- several quantities print as "1½" (cloves, allspice, soda, sour cream, currants) where "½" would sit better: 1½ teaspoonfuls each of cloves and allspice against a mere ¼ teaspoon of nutmeg looks out of proportion, and 1½ cupfuls of sour cream against 3 cupfuls of flour makes a slack batter for a fruit cake. This is guesswork rather than anything the text supports. If you do cut back, try ½ teaspoon each of cloves and allspice and ½ to ¾ cup cream, but leave the soda as printed -- it is the only leavening and 1½ teaspoonfuls is unremarkable for this much flour.
- CriscoPlain vegetable shortening, and the reason the book exists. Modern Crisco is reformulated but behaves the same in creaming; an equal weight of butter works and tastes better, though the crumb will be slightly firmer.
- Soda and sour creamThe soda is the only leavening, and it reacts on contact with the acid cream and molasses. Have the tin ready and get the cake into the oven promptly once mixed.
- Real sour creamPeriod sour cream was naturally soured and would have been thinner than today's thickened cultured product. Full-fat cultured sour cream is the closest match; buttermilk works too, but the crumb will be leaner.
- Criscoed and papered tinGrease the pan, line the base and sides with parchment, then grease the paper. A 9- or 10-inch deep round or a tube pan suits the volume; the paper is what stops the fruit sugars welding to the metal.
- FruitCurrants here means dried Zante currants, not fresh berries. Toss the raisins and currants in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in so they stay suspended.
- Doneness and yieldNinety minutes in a slow oven is a starting point; test with a skewer at the centre and expect up to two hours in a deep tin. One large cake, roughly 16 to 20 slices, and it improves after a day or two wrapped.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's campaign to persuade cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable fat, introduced in 1911, could stand in for both lard and butter; the recipe section was compiled by Marion Harris Neil, described on the title page as formerly cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. That commercial purpose explains the verb "Criscoed" and the cup of shortening at the head of the list. The cake itself belongs to an older American family than the product: a dark, soda-risen molasses fruit cake, spiced with cinnamon, cloves, allspice and nutmeg and enriched with soured dairy, of a kind generally associated with Southern manuscript and community cookbooks through the nineteenth century. It is distinct from the pale, butter-and-brandy wedding fruit cake, and cheaper — molasses and currants rather than sugar and candied peel — which may be part of why versions of it stayed in print in a book aimed at ordinary household budgets.