Dark Spots
Yolks of three eggs, one cup molasses, one half cup of butter, two cups flour, one teaspoonful of soda, one-third cup of milk, and flavor with mixed spices. Nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon. Butter well the tin and put in the pan alternate layers of light and dark spots, having the light mostly on top; then take a large spoon and stir around only once. This makes the spots more uniform; do this when in the pan to bake; do not stir from the bottom.
This is only half a cake: the dark, spiced, molasses batter of an old-fashioned marble cake, meant to be dropped into the tin alongside a plain white batter. Read the points below before you start, because the recipe assumes knowledge the page does not supply.
- You need the light batter too"Dark Spots" is one of a pair; the companion "light" batter is a plain butter cake made with white sugar, often with egg whites only. Any simple white or yellow butter cake batter of roughly equal volume will do, and using the whites left over from the three yolks here is a plausible period solution.
- No sugar, and that is correctThe cup of molasses is the entire sweetener. Molasses sold today is generally milder than much of what was available in the period, so the colour and flavour may be gentler; a dark molasses (not blackstrap) will come closer to the original.
- Why soda with no acidThere is no cream of tartar or sour milk because molasses is itself acidic and reacts with the teaspoon of soda. Use plain baking soda, not baking powder, and get the batter into the oven promptly once mixed.
- "Mixed spices"Nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon, unmeasured. About a teaspoon of cinnamon, half a teaspoon of nutmeg and a quarter teaspoon of cloves suits this quantity of batter; cloves dominate quickly, so keep them the smallest share.
- The one stirThis is the hinge of the whole recipe. Once the alternating spoonfuls are in the tin, drag a large spoon around the pan one time, horizontally, without reaching the bottom. More stirring, or any lifting motion, blends the two batters into a uniform brown and the marbling is lost.
- Pan and ovenThe recipe gives neither pan size nor oven heat. The two batters together will roughly fill a 9-inch tube pan or a 9x13 sheet; a moderate oven of around 350F, about 40 to 50 minutes for the tube pan and 30 to 35 for the sheet, until a skewer comes out clean, is a reasonable modern reading. Molasses browns fast, so judge doneness by the skewer rather than colour.
- YieldThe dark batter alone is roughly three cups; combined with an equal quantity of light batter it makes one large cake, twelve to sixteen slices. It keeps well, and like most molasses cakes it is better on the second day.
Marble cake was a fixture of American home baking from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and cookbooks of the period often print it as two separate receipts to be combined in the tin, sometimes headed "light part" and "dark part" and here, more vividly, "Dark Spots." The division was practical as well as decorative: the light batter used egg whites and refined white sugar, the dark used the yolks with molasses and spices, so a single baking consumed a whole egg and stretched expensive white sugar. Molasses did double duty, sweetening and colouring the batter and supplying the acid that made saleratus or baking soda rise, which is why so many nineteenth-century spice cakes are dark. The insistence on a single horizontal stir appears to be a genuinely old piece of technique, and it survives because it works.