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Mocha Cake
Sift 6 cups flour with 1 teaspoon baking powder into a basin, add 1 teaspoon each of powdered cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves, 1 cup brown sugar, 1/2 teaspoonful salt, and 1 cup Crisco; rub well together, add 1/2 a cup golden syrup, 1 cup strong cold coffee, 2 well beaten eggs, 1 cup currants and 1 cup sultana raisins, mix well together. Pour into Criscoed and papered tin and bake in moderate oven 2 hours.
A stiff, dark spice-and-fruit cake leavened almost entirely by eggs and creaming. It behaves more like a fruit loaf than a layer cake, and the two-hour bake is genuine.
- Mocha means coffee onlyThere is no chocolate here, and none should be added. "Mocha" in this period generally signalled coffee flavouring; the recipe calls for strong cold coffee, so brew it well and let it cool fully so it does not melt the shortening.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it, and it is still on shelves. Any solid vegetable shortening works; 1 cup butter also works and improves the flavour, though the crumb will be slightly less tender. "Criscoed" pan means greased.
- The leavening is very lowOne teaspoon of baking powder to 6 cups of flour is a fraction of modern practice and will give a close, heavy, fruitcake-like crumb. That is consistent with the style, but if you want a lighter cake, modern proportions of about 1 teaspoon per cup of flour would come to roughly 2 tablespoons total, and expect a different, more cakey result.
- Golden syrup and sultanasGolden syrup is Lyle's or any cane invert syrup; light corn syrup is the usual substitute, slightly less flavourful. Sultana raisins are golden raisins. Currants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh berries.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; 'moderate' is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F. For a dense loaf of this size, 325F for the full two hours gives a better result without a scorched crust. Test with a skewer at 90 minutes.
- Papered tinLine the base and sides with parchment. A cake this heavy, baked this long, will stick and darken at the edges otherwise.
- Basin and mixingA basin is a mixing bowl. "Rub well together" is the old rubbed-in method: work the shortening into the dry ingredients with the fingertips until sandy, before the liquids go in.
- Pan size and yieldNo tin is specified. This is a large batter — use a 10-inch tube pan or two 9x5-inch loaf tins, and expect 16 to 20 servings. It keeps for a week wrapped, and improves after a day.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of the recipe books Procter & Gamble published to teach cooks what to do with Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening it introduced in 1911, which is why a spice cake calls for shortening rather than the butter or lard a home cook of the 1890s would have reached for. The name mocha traces to Mokha, the Yemeni Red Sea port through which much of Europe's early coffee passed, and by the late nineteenth century the word had detached from its origin and simply meant coffee-flavoured in confectionery — the modern coffee-and-chocolate sense came later.