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Coffee Cake (Two cups brown sugar one)
Two cups brown sugar, one of butter, one of molasses, one of strong coffee as prepared for the table, four eggs, one tea-spoon saleratus, two of cinnamon, two of cloves, one of grated nutmeg, pound raisins, one of currants, four cups flour. -Mrs. Wm. Skinner, Battle Creek, Mich.
A heavy spiced fruit cake leavened with soda and brewed coffee, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you knew what to do with it. The original gives no pan, no oven and no time, so the notes below fill those gaps.
- Saleratus is baking sodaOne teaspoon of modern baking soda is the direct substitute. The acid it needs comes from the molasses and the coffee, so do not swap in baking powder without rebalancing.
- The ambiguous fruit line"Pound raisins, one of currants" almost certainly means one pound of each, following the pattern of the preceding clauses. Two pounds of dried fruit against four cups of flour makes a dense, fruit-packed cake; if that seems excessive, half a pound of each still works with the batter as written.
- Strong coffee "as prepared for the table"Ordinary brewed drip coffee, on the strong side, cooled to room temperature before it meets the butter and eggs. Not espresso, and not coffee extract.
- Butter and sugar quantitiesA cup of butter is two sticks, 8 oz. Brown sugar should be packed; period brown sugar was less refined than most of today's light brown, so a darker sugar is a reasonable choice alongside the molasses and spice.
- Add saltButter of this period was usually salted, and recipes of this kind often call for no additional salt. With modern unsalted butter, add half a teaspoon of salt to the flour.
- Oven and panThe recipe gives no oven; a moderate one, around 350F, in a greased and lined 10-inch tube pan or two 9x5 loaf pans, is a reasonable modern reading. A cake this dense and this wet with molasses runs long: roughly 1 to 1.5 hours for loaves, longer for a tube pan. Test with a skewer at the deepest point.
- Flour the fruitToss the raisins and currants with a few spoonfuls of the measured flour before folding them in, or they will sink through a batter this rich and settle in a band at the bottom.
- Yield and keepingA large cake; with two pounds of fruit the finished weight runs well above 4 lb. Like most molasses-and-spice fruit cakes it improves after a day or two wrapped tightly, as the crumb moistens and the cloves settle down.
"Coffee cake" in an American book of 1877 often means not the German Kaffeekuchen served with coffee but a cake with coffee in it, as here, where a cup of table coffee stands in for the milk or water another spice cake would use. Coffee darkens the crumb and sharpens the molasses. Buckeye Cookery was assembled from contributions by named women across Ohio, Michigan and neighbouring states, and Mrs. Skinner's entry has the compression typical of the genre: a list of quantities, no method, no oven, on the assumption that any woman reading it had creamed butter and sugar a thousand times and knew her own stove better than a book could tell her.