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Molasses Cake
One-half cup molasses, one-half cup sugar, one egg, scant cup of shortening (butter and lard mixed), one-half teaspoon cloves, one teaspoon cinnamon, one and one-half cups flour, one small teaspoon soda dissolved in one-half cup of boiling water.
— Mrs. Mattice
A plain spice cake of the sort kept in a tin on the sideboard: no baking powder, no milk, and the only leavening a spoonful of soda slaked in boiling water. The receipt gives no pan, no oven and no time, all of which the contributor assumed her reader knew.
- The soda and boiling waterThe soda is listed dissolved in boiling water, and it is usually taken as the last addition: once in, it begins reacting with the acid in the molasses. Have the pan greased and the oven up to heat before you stir it in, and get the batter into the oven promptly.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F. In an 8-inch square or a 9-inch round pan this is roughly 25 to 30 minutes; the cake is done when it springs back and a straw comes out clean. Molasses browns early, so judge by touch rather than colour.
- The shortening quantityA scant cup of fat against only one and one-half cups of flour is a very high proportion, higher than one commonly sees in molasses cakes of this kind. The figure may be worth treating with suspicion; a scant half cup gives a lighter result, unless you want something close to a gingerbread pudding.
- "Butter and lard mixed"The receipt does not give the proportions; an even split is a reasonable reading, butter for flavour and lard for tenderness. All butter works; modern vegetable shortening gives a softer, blander crumb.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter than what was sold as table molasses.
- SpicingHalf a teaspoon of cloves is assertive by modern taste; if you want the cinnamon to read at all, use fresh ground.
- YieldOne shallow 8-inch cake, cutting into nine or twelve squares. It keeps well wrapped for three or four days and improves on the second day as the spices settle.
Molasses cakes filled the gap between everyday bread and a proper company cake in nineteenth-century households: molasses was cheaper than refined sugar, kept well in the jug, and carried enough acid to work with saleratus or soda where there was no buttermilk on hand. The pairing of cloves and cinnamon with molasses is a common American spice-cake register of the period, related to older English gingerbreads but built around a sweetener the colonies had in quantity through the West Indies trade. Books of this sort printed such receipts in the contributor's own shorthand, signed with her name, and the oven and pan often go unmentioned: the readers were presumed to know the method already.