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Sour Milk Cake
One cup of sugar, butter the size of an egg, one cup of sour milk, one teaspoon of soda, one cup of chopped raisins.
— Mrs. Jacob Hollenbeck
A village receipt written for someone who already knew how the cake went together: there is no flour, no egg, no spice and no oven direction in the original. What follows fills in what the writer assumed and flags what genuinely cannot be recovered.
- The missing flourA cake built on one cup of sugar and one cup of liquid conventionally took about two cups of flour in this period. The original gives no figure, so any amount is a reconstruction rather than a reading of the receipt.
- Butter the size of an eggA standard nineteenth-century measure usually read as roughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Cooks judged it by eye against a hen's egg, which was often smaller than a modern large egg.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means raw milk clabbered at room temperature, acidic enough to react with the teaspoon of soda. Pasteurised milk left out spoils rather than sours; buttermilk is the usual stand-in, cup for cup.
- Soda measureOne teaspoon of soda to one cup of acidic milk is on the generous side by modern practice, and soda in excess of the acid can leave a soapy, faintly metallic edge. Get the batter into the pan promptly, since the lift is lost if it stands.
- RaisinsRaisins of this period were often seeded and sold in dry, leathery clusters that had to be stemmed, which is the likely reason for chopping. Modern seedless raisins need no chopping, though a rough chop still distributes them better and keeps them from sinking.
- OvenNo oven direction of any kind is given. For the reconstruction, a moderate oven, about 350F, for roughly 35 to 45 minutes suits a loaf or square cake of this size; the figure is supplied, not implied by the receipt.
- YieldAs reconstructed, one 8-inch square or a small loaf, about eight servings.
Sour milk cakes belong to the era before reliable commercial baking powder was in every pantry, when the leavening came from a household's own surplus of clabbered milk meeting a spoonful of saleratus or soda. On a farm or in a village with a cow at the back of the lot, milk turned every few days and cooks had a standing incentive to use it; the cake, the doughnut and the griddle cake were all ways of turning a souring crock into supper. This receipt's terseness is characteristic of community cookbooks like the Catskill collection: the contributor was writing for readers who shared her kitchen habits and did not need to be told that a cake takes flour. The result is a document of what was assumed rather than a set of instructions, and it carries the attribution to Mrs. Jacob Hollenbeck.