Black Part
One cup brown sugar, one-half cup molasses, one-half cup butter, one-half cup sweet milk, one and one-half teaspoons baking powder, two and one-half cups flour, yolks of four eggs, one teaspoon cinnamon, one-half of a nutmeg, one-half teaspoon cloves, one-half teaspoon allspice; first put a tablespoonful of the light in, then one of the dark, and so on alternately; bake in a pan with a tube in it.
This is only half a cake: the dark batter of a marble cake, meant to be spooned into the pan alternately with a companion "Light Part" recipe that used the egg whites. Read it alongside that recipe before you start, since neither one fills a tube pan on its own.
- The hinge: alternate quicklyBoth batters should be mixed and ready before either goes into the pan, and the spooning done briskly. If the first batter stands too long, the baking powder will have spent some of its lift and the two may not swirl together as cleanly.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk that other recipes of the period called for. Do not substitute buttermilk here, as the leavening is baking powder alone and there is no soda to react with the acid.
- Half a nutmegHalf a whole nutmeg, grated, is roughly one to one and a half teaspoons of ground nutmeg. It is a heavy hand by modern taste; three-quarters of a teaspoon may suit better alongside the cinnamon, cloves and allspice.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the table molasses of the period, and not treacle-style syrups sold as "dark". The molasses supplies both the colour and much of the moisture.
- Butter and creamingThe recipe gives no method beyond the ingredient list, as was standard. Cream the softened butter with the brown sugar, beat in the yolks and molasses, then add the dry ingredients alternately with the milk.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven instruction at all. A tube pan of this size will take roughly 45 to 60 minutes at around 350F; test with a skewer at the thickest point of the batter, not at the rim.
- The pan with a tube in itAn ordinary angel-food or bundt-style tube pan, 9 to 10 inches. The central tube conducts heat through the middle of a dense, molasses-heavy batter that would otherwise stay raw at the centre. Grease and flour it well; molasses batters stick.
- YieldThe two batters together fill one tube pan and give 12 to 16 slices. The cake keeps better than a plain butter cake, four or five days wrapped, and the spices settle in after the first day.
Marble cake was a fixture of nineteenth-century American cookbooks, and it appears in collections like this one split into two entries, a "Light Part" and a "Black Part," because that is how it was made and how the ingredients balanced: the pale batter took the four egg whites, the dark one took the four yolks, and nothing was wasted. The darkness came from molasses and brown sugar with the spice mixture of the period, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and allspice, rather than from chocolate, which is generally said to have become the usual marbling agent only later, as cocoa grew cheaper and more reliably available in home kitchens. A spiced butter cake baked in a tube pan was everyday keeping cake, cut for the light evening meal or for company at tea, not a dessert in the formal sense.