Home › Cake-Making › Spice Cake
Spice Cake
One cupful of sugar, one cupful of sour milk, one cupful of raisins, one egg, a nutmeg, one teaspoonful of cloves, two teaspoonfuls of cinnamon, one teaspoonful of soda and three cupfuls of flour. Bake slowly but steadily until done.
ANOTHER. One cupful butter, one of brown sugar, one and one-half of sour milk, one pint molasses, one tablespoonful saleratus, three eggs, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, nutmegs, citron, currants, raisins. Stir stiff with flour.
Two versions of the same idea: a soda-raised, sour-milk spice cake, one plain and thrifty, one enormous and rich. Neither gives a pan, a temperature or a time, so the notes below fill those gaps.
- Sour milk is the leavening partnerThe acid in genuinely soured raw milk is what activates the soda. Cultured buttermilk is the direct modern substitute, cup for cup; failing that, stir 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar into a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. Do not use sweet milk that has simply gone off in the refrigerator.
- Saleratus is baking sodaSaleratus is the period equivalent of baking soda -- originally potassium bicarbonate, later sodium bicarbonate -- and can be substituted measure for measure. In the second recipe a tablespoon of it sounds alarming, but it is neutralising a pint of molasses plus a cup and a half of sour milk. Sift it with a little of the flour rather than dumping it in, or you may get bitter yellow streaks.
- "A nutmeg" means the whole seedGrated, one nutmeg yields roughly 2 to 3 teaspoons, which will dominate the first cake. A teaspoon is closer to modern taste. "Nutmegs" plural in the second recipe is best read as one or two for a batter that size.
- The second recipe has no flour quantity"Stir stiff with flour" is the only guide, and with a pint of molasses and a cup and a half of sour milk you are looking at somewhere around 7 to 8 cups. Add it a cup at a time until the batter is thick enough to fall from the spoon in a heavy mass rather than pour. This is a genuinely imprecise instruction and no honest conversion exists.
- Slow ovenSlow bake -- "Bake slowly but steadily" points to what later books call a slow oven, which in a modern oven is usually taken as somewhere around 300 to 325F. The first cake, in a greased 9-inch square or a loaf pan, will take about 45 minutes to an hour; the second is a very large fruited batter and wants two loaf pans or a deep tube pan and up to two hours. Test with a skewer and tent with foil if the top darkens early.
- The first cake has no fatThat is not an omission in the printing; butterless cakes were printed as economy recipes. Expect a firm, chewy, slightly dry crumb that keeps well rather than a tender one. A quarter cup of melted butter will soften it if you would rather it were a modern cake.
- Citron and currantsCitron here is candied citron peel, sold in tubs around the winter holidays and worth chopping fine. Currants are dried Zante grapes, not fresh redcurrants and not raisins; if you cannot find them, more raisins will do. Toss all the fruit in a spoonful of the measured flour so it does not sink.
- YieldThe first makes one modest loaf or square, about 9 servings. The second is a party-sized batter, considerably more than two 9x5 loaves will hold, and it improves after a day or two wrapped.
Sour milk and saleratus define a whole generation of American home baking. Before reliable commercial baking powder was cheap and universal, cooks raised cakes by pairing an alkali with whatever acid the kitchen produced on its own — sour milk from churning day, or molasses. Spice cake of this kind sat between plain cake and fruitcake: the spices and dried fruit were shelf-stable pantry goods, the sweetening was often molasses or brown sugar rather than expensive white, though not always, and the whole thing could be mixed in a single bowl without creaming. That the first version contains no butter at all marks it as the economical option, the sort of recipe printed for households where eggs and fat were counted; the second, with a cupful of butter, three eggs, citron and two kinds of dried fruit, is the same cake dressed for company.