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Congress Cake
One cup of sugar, three tablespoons of molasses, one cup raisins, one teaspoon of cinnamon, one-half cup of shortening, one cup of sour milk, a little salt, one large teaspoon of saleratus, lastly two cups of flour, two eggs.
— Mrs. Charles Deer
A typical village-book cake: an ingredient list with no method, no pan and no oven. The chemistry is the sour milk and saleratus, and that is what needs attention first.
- Saleratus is baking sodaSaleratus is the period name for the chemical leaven -- potassium bicarbonate earlier in the century, and by the later 1800s usually what we would call baking soda. Use 1 level teaspoon of modern baking soda, not the heaped "large teaspoon" called for. Saleratus was coarser, often lumpy and variable in strength; today's soda is finer and more reliable, and an excess leaves a soapy, faintly metallic taste and a brownish crumb.
- Sour milkThis means milk naturally soured at room temperature, which pasteurised milk will not do safely. Substitute 1 cup buttermilk, or 1 cup whole milk with 1 tablespoon lemon juice or cider vinegar stirred in and left five minutes. The acid is what the soda reacts with, so it is not optional.
- ShorteningIn this period the word means solid fat generally, most often lard or butter, not the hydrogenated vegetable product the name later attached to. Half a cup of butter gives the best flavour with molasses and cinnamon.
- MolassesThree tablespoons is for colour and flavour rather than sweetness. Use unsulphured light or dark molasses; blackstrap is markedly more bitter and will overpower the cake.
- Method, since none is givenCream the shortening and sugar, beat in the eggs, then the molasses. Dissolve the soda in the sour milk and add it alternately with the flour and salt, and fold in the raisins last, tossed in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink. Once the soda meets the acid the rise begins, so get it into the pan promptly.
- Pan and ovenThe batter suits one 9x5-inch loaf pan or an 8-inch square, greased and floured. Bake at 350F: about 45 to 55 minutes for the loaf, 30 to 35 for the square, until a skewer comes out clean.
- YieldOne loaf, roughly 10 to 12 slices. It is a keeping cake and improves wrapped overnight, as the molasses draws moisture back into the crumb.
"Congress cake" belongs to a family of American spice-and-molasses cakes with civic names -- election cake, muster cake, training-day cake -- that were baked for public gatherings and then kept their names long after the occasions faded. The link to any particular assembly is traditional rather than documented; by the time this receipt was collected the title simply signalled a sturdy, dark, raisin-studded cake fit for company. What makes it of its moment is the pairing of sour milk and saleratus. Before commercial baking powder was cheap and universal, cooks leavened with an alkali activated by whatever acid the household already had, and sour milk was free -- the natural end of milk left standing in a cool pantry. That this appears among "Village Receipts," credited to Mrs. Charles Deer, is characteristic of church and community cookbooks generally: neighbours contributed what they made often, assuming any reader would already know how to mix and bake it.