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Plain Fruit Cake
One-half cup molasses, one cup each butter and sugar, two cups flour, two eggs, one tablespoon sour milk, one tablespoonful each of cinnamon and cloves, one nutmeg, one teaspoonful soda, one pound raisins.
The original is a bare ingredient list in the style of a cook's memorandum — no pan, no temperature, no time. What follows fills in the missing method and flags the two proportions that need attention.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then the molasses. Dissolve the soda in the tablespoon of sour milk and add it. Stir the spices into the flour, fold that in, then the raisins, which should be tossed with a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- Pan and ovenThis is a stiff, heavy batter — a greased and lined 9x5 inch loaf pan or a small tube pan. Bake at 325F for about 1 hour 15 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean. Fruit cakes of this density scorch at higher heat before the centre sets.
- Sour milk and sodaA single tablespoon of sour milk will not neutralise a whole teaspoon of soda; the acidity of the molasses would account for most of the rest. Buttermilk substitutes directly for sour milk.
- The spicing is very heavyA tablespoon each of cinnamon and cloves plus a whole grated nutmeg (roughly 2 to 3 teaspoons) is heavy by modern standards. With fresh supermarket spice, halving the cloves in particular is worth considering — clove turns medicinal fast.
- A pound of raisins to two cups of flourTwo cups of flour weigh roughly 8 to 9 ounces, so the fruit outweighs the flour by about two to one. Expect a dark, dense, almost pudding-like crumb rather than a cake, and a loaf that will be fragile until fully cool.
- "Plain" means no brandy or citron"Plain" probably means no brandy or citron -- The title most likely distinguishes this from a rich fruit cake: raisins only, with no candied peel, currants, almonds or spirits called for.
- Yield and keepingOne loaf, about 12 to 16 thin slices. Wrapped closely, it improves for several days as the molasses and spice settle.
Household cook books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often carried two grades of fruit cake: the "rich" or "wedding" cake, weighed out in pounds of currants, citron, almonds and brandy and boiled or baked for hours, and a "plain" or "common" version like this one — molasses, spice, and whatever raisins the pantry held. The plain sort was everyday baking, made for tea and lunch pails rather than for keeping a year in a tin. The heavy hand with cinnamon, cloves and a whole nutmeg is generally traced to a period when ground spice was bought in quantity and stored loose, so that it may well have lost much of its punch, and when molasses is often said to have served as the cheap household sweetener. That the recipe is written as a shorthand list with no instructions at all suggests it was set down for a cook who already knew how a fruit cake was assembled and needed only the proportions.