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Coffee Cake (Mrs Jesse Little)
— Mrs. Jesse Little
One pound pork chopped fine, one pint coffee, two cups sugar, one cup molasses, one teaspoon soda, two ounces of cinnamon, one ounce of cloves, one ounce of nutmeg, six cups flour, one pound of raisins, one pound of currants.
— Miss Henrietta Brown
This is a salt-pork fruit cake of the old New England type, where finely chopped fat pork replaces butter entirely. The receipt gives no oven, no pan and no time, so those decisions are yours.
- The hinge: pour the coffee boiling hotThe hinge: the coffee is probably meant to go on hot -- The receipt does not say, but in other pork cakes of this type the boiling liquid is poured over the finely chopped pork and left to stand until barely warm. The heat softens and partly renders the fat so it disperses through the batter.
- What kind of porkThe receipt says only "pork"; cakes of this kind normally used salt pork or fatback with little or no lean, rinsed of surface salt. Avoid fresh lean pork or bacon: lean meat stays as stringy fibres in the cake, and bacon cure brings smoke and cure flavour the recipe does not want. One pound of fat pork is standing in for a pound of butter, i.e. about two cups.
- The spices are almost certainly overstatedTwo ounces of cinnamon is about half a cup of ground spice, and an ounce each of cloves and nutmeg is roughly a quarter cup each again. Pork cakes of this period were often heavily spiced, and this quantity is at the outer edge of palatable; a tablespoon of cinnamon and a teaspoon each of cloves and nutmeg is nearer modern taste. Scale up from there if you like it fierce.
- Soda and molassesThe single teaspoon of soda is raised by the acid in the molasses, and there is no other leavening. This gives a dense, dark, close-textured cake, not a light one. Do not add baking powder expecting a sponge.
- Oven and timeBake slow: 300–325F. In two loaf pans, lined and greased, allow about 1½ to 2 hours; in a single large tube or milk pan, closer to 2½. Test with a skewer, and tent the top with paper if it colours early.
- FruitTwo pounds of dried fruit to six cups of flour is a heavy load. Toss the raisins and currants with a little of the measured flour before folding them in so they stay suspended rather than sinking. Modern currants and raisins are softer than the dried fruit of the period and need no soaking.
- Yield and keepingThe ingredients come to something like seven pounds of batter, so expect five to six pounds of cake: more than two ordinary loaf tins will hold comfortably. Like other fruit cakes it improves after a few days wrapped closely, and it keeps well in a tin.
- SaltNo salt is listed because the pork supplies it. If you rinse the pork hard or use unsalted fat, add half a teaspoon.
Salt pork cake was a thrift cake of the northeastern United States, turning up in community cookbooks of the region through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In a farm household with a barrel of salt pork always at hand, boiling coffee or water poured over the chopped fat produced a workable substitute shortening. The heavy spicing and the two pounds of dried fruit help mask any porkiness and mark the cake as a special-occasion bake; it is usually found under the name "pork cake" or, as here, "coffee cake." The page carries two names — headed to Mrs. Jesse Little and signed by Miss Henrietta Brown — a double attribution of the kind that occurs in compiled village receipt books, though what happened in this particular case cannot be recovered.