Coffee Cake
One cup butter, one cup sugar, one cup molasses, one cup cold coffee (strong,) four cups flour, nutmeg to suit taste, one and onehalf teaspoons cream tartar, two eggs, three-fourths spoon soda, and fruit if you like; put soda in the coffee, and cream tartar in the flour.
A molasses-and-coffee spice cake of the type that filled the cake plate at a nineteenth-century tea table — not the streusel-topped breakfast cake the name now suggests. The recipe assumes you know how to build a butter cake, so the working details are left out.
- The leavening is a two-part systemCream of tartar in the flour and soda in the liquid was the standard homemade substitute for baking powder. Follow the instruction literally: the soda dissolved in the cold coffee begins reacting as soon as it meets the acid in the flour and the molasses, so get the batter into the pan and into the oven without delay.
- "Three-fourths spoon soda"Read as three-quarters of a teaspoon. Nineteenth-century books use "spoon" loosely, but a tablespoon of soda against four cups of flour would be soapy and dark. If you prefer a single modern leavener, about 2 teaspoons baking powder plus a scant 1/2 teaspoon soda for the molasses gives a comparable rise.
- Method the recipe omitsCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the molasses and the soda-coffee alternately with the cream-of-tartar flour. Mix only until smooth — this is a heavy batter and overworking it after the leavening has activated costs you the lift.
- MolassesUse a mild unsulphured molasses. Blackstrap, which was not the household default, is far more bitter and will overwhelm both the coffee and the nutmeg.
- Coffee'Strong' likely meant leftover breakfast coffee, which would have stood and concentrated on the stove. Brewed at double strength and thoroughly cooled is right; hot coffee will melt the creamed butter.
- NutmegGrate it fresh — about a teaspoon suits this quantity of batter. Pre-ground nutmeg from a jar is considerably flatter and you will want more of it.
- Fruit, if you likeRaisins, currants or chopped candied peel, 1 to 1 1/2 cups. Toss them in a little of the measured flour first so they do not sink through a batter this loose.
- Pan and ovenThe batter fills a 10-inch tube pan, or can be divided between two loaf pans, which it will fill less generously. The recipe gives no oven direction; at 350F, allow roughly 55 to 65 minutes for the tube pan, 45 to 55 for loaves, until a skewer comes out clean. Molasses cakes brown early, so judge by the skewer rather than the colour.
- KeepingMakes 16 to 20 slices. Like most molasses cakes it improves after a day wrapped tightly, and it keeps a week.
Before commercial baking powder was cheap and reliable, the acid and the alkali were bought separately and the cook combined them herself — cream of tartar, a byproduct of winemaking, sifted into the flour, and saleratus or soda dissolved in the liquid. The careful instruction here to keep them apart until mixing is the whole point of the recipe's last clause. Coffee cake in this sense simply meant a cake in which cold coffee did the work of milk or water, a thrifty use of the breakfast pot that also deepened the colour and cut the sweetness of a full cup of molasses. It was not the only sense of the name in circulation: German-American yeasted Kaffeekuchen was already current in nineteenth-century America alongside cakes like this one.