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Spice Cake (Rub one cup of sugar)
Rub one cup of sugar and one-half cup butter to a cream, add one cup milk. Measure two cups flour sifted with three teaspoons baking powder, a level teaspoon of cinnamon, one-half teaspoon grated nutmeg and pinch of cloves. Sift, mix well and beat until fluffy.
— Mrs. Harmon Hallenbeck
A typical village contribution: the mixing is spelled out, the baking is left to the cook's judgment. A few gaps need filling before this works in a modern kitchen.
- No baking instructions at allThe receipt stops at the batter. Bake in a greased 8-inch square pan or a loaf pan at 350F, 30-35 minutes for the square, 45-55 for the loaf, until a skewer comes out clean.
- No eggsThe receipt lists none, and eggless milk-and-baking-powder cakes do appear in household books of the period, so this may well be as intended rather than an oversight. Expect a tender, slightly crumbly, almost muffin-like cake rather than a springy one. Adding an egg changes the character of the recipe.
- "Rub to a cream"Creaming by hand with the back of a spoon or a wooden paddle. Butter at cool room temperature, 65F, and about three minutes with a mixer on medium gets you there.
- Order of operationsAs written the milk goes in before the flour, which will look curdled. That is fine — the flour brings it together. Alternately add the dry mixture and the milk in two or three additions for a smoother batter.
- "Pinch of cloves"Read this as about 1/8 teaspoon of ground cloves. Adjust to taste: cloves lose potency in the jar, so a long-opened jar may need a little more.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to two cups of flour is high by modern standards but not unreasonable for an eggless cake, which relies on chemical leavening alone. Baking powders of the period were generally single-acting, releasing their gas on mixing rather than in the oven; with a current double-acting brand, 2 teaspoons is plenty.
- SiftingThe instruction to sift is worth keeping here. With no eggs to carry air, the aeration from sifting and the final beating is doing real structural work.
- YieldAbout eight to nine servings from an 8-inch pan. Better on the second day, once the spices have settled through the crumb.
Spice cake in a book like this is a pantry cake — everything in it kept on a shelf. Cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves keep indefinitely, long after fresh fruit or nuts had gone out of season, and the eggless formula made it an economical everyday cake rather than a company one. Community cookbooks of the period were assembled by church guilds, libraries and village improvement societies, each contributor signing her receipt as Mrs. Harmon Hallenbeck did here, and the shorthand quality of the writing is characteristic: the women reading it already knew what pan to use and how hot the stove should be, so nobody thought to write it down. Hallenbeck is an old Dutch-derived name associated with the Catskill and Coxsackie area, though a single contributor's name is thin evidence for where the book itself came from.