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Fruit Loaf
This is the way to make a delicious fruit loaf: Cut candied cherries, dates, figs, citron, raisins and pineapple into fine bits and roll them into cream paste, previously prepared. Shape the paste and fruit like a loaf of bread and coat lightly with melted chocolate. Cut into slices when it hardens. Nut loaf is made by the same recipe, omitting the fruit and using nuts.
A confection rather than a baked loaf: fondant is kneaded full of chopped candied fruit, formed into a brick, jacketed in chocolate and sliced. The book assumes you have already made its fondant, so that step is the one to get right.
- "Cream paste" means fondantAlmost certainly the cooked sugar fondant the recipe assumes you have already made: sugar and water (often with a little cream of tartar or corn syrup) boiled to the soft-ball stage, about 238-240F, poured out, cooled to lukewarm, then worked with a spatula until it turns opaque and stiff. Bought rolled fondant works, though it is sweeter and softer than the cooked kind.
- Let the fondant ripenFreshly creamed fondant is stiff and hard to knead. Wrap it and leave it several hours or overnight before working in the fruit; it mellows and smooths as it stands.
- CitronCandied citron peel, from a thick-rinded citrus grown chiefly for preserving. It is still sold around the winter holidays; candied orange or lemon peel is the nearest everyday substitute.
- Cut the fruit dry, not stickyDates, figs and pineapple gum up a knife. Dust the pieces lightly with powdered sugar or cornstarch after chopping so they disperse through the fondant instead of clumping. The recipe gives no proportions; too much fruit relative to the paste will stop the loaf holding a slice.
- The chocolate coatingFor a shell that snaps and stays glossy, temper the chocolate — melt to about 115F, cool to 82F, rewarm to 88-90F for dark. Untempered chocolate will set dull and streaked and soften at room temperature; the recipe itself asks only for melted chocolate.
- SlicingChill the finished loaf just until firm, 20 to 30 minutes, then cut with a thin knife warmed in hot water and wiped dry. A cold, hard shell shatters under the blade; a warm one smears.
- Nut versionToast and cool the nuts before chopping them in. Warm nuts weep oil into the fondant and the paste turns slack.
- Yield and keepingKeeping -- Keep the loaf wrapped in a cool, dry place, not the refrigerator, where the chocolate will bloom and the fondant sweat.
Home candy making was a fashionable domestic hobby by the 1890s, and general cookbooks of the period often carry a chapter on it. Two things made that possible: refined cane sugar had become cheap and reliably fine-grained, and the cold-water test — on which home recipes of the period overwhelmingly relied, thermometers still being uncommon in domestic kitchens — put the soft-ball stage within reach of an ordinary kitchen. Fondant — often called "French cream" in American books of the era — was the workhorse of the chapter, a neutral sweet paste that could be flavored, tinted, rolled around nuts, or, as here, packed with candied fruit and sliced to imitate a fruited bread. Recipes of this shape let a household approximate the expensive glace-fruit confections then sold in city confectioners' shops.