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Fruit Jelly Cake, the Dark Part
Take half a cup of brown sugar, the yolks of two eggs, a smali tablespoonful of butter, half a cup of sour cream, half a teaspoonful of cinnamon, half a teaspoonful of soda, half a nutmeg, one cup of seeded and chopped raisins, and one cup of flour; use rather scant measure of each ingredient.
This is only half a cake: the spiced, fruited layer meant to alternate with a plain white layer, the two stacked with jelly between. The original assumes you know how to bake a jelly-cake layer, so the missing pan, temperature and time are the first things to supply.
- Pan and ovenJelly-cake layers are thin, baked in shallow round tins. The original gives no pan, temperature or time. This quantity should fill one 8-inch layer pan (in a 9-inch it will be very thin); a moderate oven, around 350F, for roughly 12 to 18 minutes, until the centre springs back, is a reasonable modern reading. Thin layers overbake fast, so check early.
- "Rather scant measure"The instruction is deliberate: heaped cups would give a batter too stiff and too sweet for a thin layer. Level everything, and err slightly under, particularly the flour.
- A small tablespoonful of butterRead this as a generous half ounce, roughly 1 tablespoon level rather than rounded. The cake gets most of its richness from the cream and yolks, not the butter.
- Sour creamHere this would have meant raw cream left to sour and thicken naturally, acidic enough to work on the soda. Modern full-fat cultured sour cream is the right substitute; low-fat versions and buttermilk are thinner and will slacken the batter.
- SodaHalf a teaspoon of baking soda is the only leavening, and it depends entirely on the acid in the cream. Sift it with the flour rather than dropping it in wet, and get the batter into the oven promptly once mixed.
- Half a nutmegFreshly grated, half a whole nutmeg comes to roughly a teaspoon or so. That is assertive by current taste; half a teaspoon may suit better. Pre-ground nutmeg is duller.
- RaisinsChopping and seeding was necessary when raisins came with seeds; seedless raisins need only chopping, which still matters, as whole fruit sinks and tears thin layers. Tossing them in a spoonful of the measured flour helps keep them suspended.
- AssemblyBake the companion light layer, cool both completely, and spread jelly or a stiff jam between them. A soft preserve will soak into the crumb and slide; currant, quince or apple jelly holds best.
Jelly cake was a fixture of American supper tables in the second half of the nineteenth century, when baking soda and sour cream let a cook leaven a cake without yeast, and thin layers baked through in a hot stove faster than a deep loaf. Recipes split into a "light part" and a "dark part" so the finished stack showed alternating pale and spiced brown layers, a simpler cousin of the more laborious ribbon and marble cakes. The dark half took its colour from brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg rather than molasses, with chopped raisins in place of the candied peel and currants of a proper fruit cake. Sour cream here is a reminder of a dairy-keeping household: cream that had turned was not waste but a leavening ingredient, its acid the necessary partner to the soda.