Loaf Cake
1 teaspoonful Ginger, 3 tablespoonfuls lukewarm Water, 1/2 cup good Molasses, 3 cups pastry Flour, 1/2 grated Nutmeg, Dissolve the Soda in the lukewarm water and add to the thick sour cream. Add the molasses and sugar. Stir awhile and then add gradually the sifted flour, cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger. Stir all well together. Pour into greased, paper-lined breadpans. Fill not over two inches deep. Bake only in medium hot oven and if browning too quickly on top, cover with greased paper.
This cake should be kept in a box or stone jar for a few days to moisten, when it will be very nice to cut. No butter or eggs are used.
A sour-cream gingerbread baked in bread pans rather than a cake tin. The printed ingredient list in this booklet is incomplete, so read the method first and reconstruct the quantities from it before you start.
- Missing amountsThe method calls for soda, thick sour cream, sugar and cinnamon, none of which appear in the ingredient list as printed here. Only the ginger, water, molasses, flour and nutmeg are given amounts; the rest are genuinely absent from the page and cannot be recovered with confidence. For three cups of pastry flour, comparable recipes of the period use roughly a cup of sour cream, a cup of sugar and a teaspoon of soda, but that is inference, not what the book says.
- The hinge is the soda and the sour creamThis cake has no butter and no eggs, so all its lift comes from soda reacting with the acid in the cream and molasses. Dissolve the soda fully in the lukewarm water, mix quickly once the two meet, and get the batter into the pans and the oven without delay.
- Thick sour creamPeriod "thick sour cream" was heavy cream soured naturally and much richer than the cultured sour cream sold now. Full-fat cultured sour cream is the closest stand-in; it supplies both the fat that replaces butter and the acid the soda needs.
- Medium hot ovenRead this as a moderate to moderately hot oven, roughly 350-375F; the book gives no number. Gingerbread batters heavy with molasses scorch on top well before the centre sets, which is why the recipe tells you to lay greased paper over the surface if it is colouring too fast.
- Pastry flourSofter and lower in protein than modern all-purpose. Substitute all-purpose flour with a couple of tablespoons per cup replaced by cornstarch, or accept a slightly firmer crumb.
- Molasses"Good molasses" means light or medium unsulphured cane molasses, not blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter and will overwhelm the spice.
- Pans and depthTwo inches is the stated maximum depth and it matters: deeper than that and the outside is dry before the middle is cooked. With the cream and sugar amounts missing, the yield is guesswork; a pair of ordinary loaf pans, greased and lined and filled no more than two inches, should do. Bake by eye and test with a skewer at the centre.
- The resting periodThe instruction to keep it in a tin or stone jar for a few days is not sentiment. An eggless molasses cake is dry and crumbly on the day it is baked and turns moist and sliceable as the sugars draw moisture back through the crumb. Wrap it well and leave it two to three days.
Soda recipe booklets of this kind were advertising in the guise of a cookbook: give the household enough good uses for bicarbonate of soda and the box empties faster. That commercial purpose shapes the recipe, which leans entirely on the soda-and-sour-acid reaction rather than on creamed butter or beaten eggs. "Loaf cake" is a description of the vessel, not a flavour he bread pads every kitchen already owned, cut in slices like bread and kept in the cake box or a stone crock. Butterless, eggless molasses cakes like this one were staples of thrift long before the First World War made them patriotic, and they survive in the record precisely because they kept well: a cake that improved over three days in a covered jar was worth more to a farm household than one that had to be eaten warm.