I present below the oldest recipe I have from my Great-grandmother's collection. It is titled, "Mrs. Bodin's Fudge Cake (Very Old Recipe)." This hand-written recipe, as it was passed down to me, must have been re-written by my grandmother as it uses "store-bought" cherries as an option.
My great-grandmother would not have had access to store bought cherries, nor would she have spent the money on them when she had her own canned cherries from the trees on her farm. She, in fact, had trouble understanding why someone would purchase a prepared food item from the store when they could make a better product on their own.
Ingredients:
- 1/2 tablespoon butter, softened
- plus 10 tablespoons (1 1/4 sticks) butter, softened
- 2 cups sugar
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
- 4 eggs
- 2 cups chopped pecans
- 1 1/4 cups drained, pitted cherries, home canned or store-bought
- (see introduction, above)
- 1/2 cup seedless raisins
- 3 tablespoons vanilla extract
Preparation:
Preheat the oven to 300°F. Grease a 9- or 10-inch cake pan with the 1/2 tablespoon softened butter. (An 8-inch cake pan is too small; the cake rises right to the top of a 9-inch pan.)
Cream the 1 1/4 sticks butter and sugar together with a fork, in a large bowl, until light and fluffy.
Sift the flour and cocoa powder together.
Add the eggs to the butter-sugar mixture, one at a time, alternately with the flour-chocolate mixture, just until the batter is combined--don't overmix or the cake will be heavy.
Fold in the remaining ingredients, just until incorporated into the batter, if you over mix, the cake will be heavy.
Bake for 1 1/2 hours.
BONUS TIP: May be garnished with whipped cream and additional cherries.
A note on antique recipes: While cakes today would be baked at a higher temperature, Mrs. Bodin probably used 300°F to be on the safe side,* as the old ovens (and this recipe is from the time of wood-burning ovens) were not nearly as accurate as what we’ve had in home kitchens for the past eighty or so years. The long cooking time is because of the low oven temperature.
*The 300°F would have been an approximate temperature, determined only by experience as they were unlikely to have had a thermometer.
The first time I tested this recipe, I turned on the oven light and watched nervously as the cake kept rising, and rising, and rising. The same thing happened the two other times I tested it, but it always stopped at the top of the 9-inch pan...just at the top. So be sure to use a 9- or 10-inch cake pan, as instructed above.
When I was in the little town of Baldwin, Louisiana (which was only minutes from the family farm my Great-grandfather Theodore Labauve built), on book tour for my book, In a Cajun Kitchen, an elderly gentleman came up to me after my talk. He told me that Mrs. Bodin was his grandmother, and he remembered her making this cake. It was wonderful to have that connection!