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Flour Mixtures Continued: Cake: Cakes
ROXBURY CAKES Yolks of 2 eggs 1/2 teaspoonful of cloves 1/2 cup of sugar Grating of nutmeg 1/4 cup of butter, softened 1 teaspoonful of soda 1/2 cup of molasses Whites of 2 eggs 1/2 cup of sour milk 1/2 cup of seeded raisins 1 1/2 cups of sifted flour 1/2 cup of walnut meats, broken 1 teaspoonful of cinnamon in pieces Prepare in the usual manner and bake in small tins; frost with boiled icing. The recipe makes 18 cakes. The recipe may be easily divided, but, as the cakes improve on keeping in an earthen jar, it may not be too large. LITTLE GOLD CAKES 1/4 cup of butter 1 level teaspoonful of baking 1/2 cup of sugar powder Yolks of 4 eggs 1 teaspoonful of orange ex- 1/4 cup of milk tract or grated rind of 7/8 cup of sifted flour 1 orange Bake in small fancy tins and cover with boiled frosting. PLAIN GINGER CAKES 1/2 cup of molasses 2 cups of flour 1 teaspoonful of soda 1/2 teaspoonful of salt 1/4 cup of butter 1/2 tablespoonful of ginger 1/4 cup of boiling water 1/2 teaspoonful of cinnamon Stir the soda into the molasses; melt the butter in the boiling water; turn all into a bowl and stir in the flour, sifted with the salt and spices; add more flour if needed, but keep the dough as soft as can be handled. Roll a little of the dough at a time to a sheet about three-eights of an inch thick and cut into rounds. Press two pecan nut meats into the top of each, and dredge with granulated sugar. Bake in a moderate oven. The recipe will make about twenty cakes.
Three small-cake recipes set in the two-column ingredient style of the period, which the transcription has interleaved — read the entries as pairs ("1 1/2 cups of sifted flour" and "1 teaspoonful of cinnamon" belong to separate columns, not to each other). All three assume the reader already knows the creaming method and needs only the proportions.
- "Prepare in the usual manner"For the Roxbury and Gold cakes this means cream the softened butter with the sugar, beat in the yolks, add the liquid alternately with the sifted dry ingredients, then fold in the stiffly beaten whites last (the Gold cakes use no whites at all). Fruit and nuts go in dredged with a little of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- Oven temperature'A moderate oven' in books of this period is usually read as somewhere around 350F, though anything from about 350 to 375F was called moderate. Small cakes in muffin-sized tins take roughly 18-22 minutes; the ginger rounds, rolled 3/8 inch thick, perhaps 10-12 minutes, and should still give slightly when pressed.
- "Small tins" and "fancy tins"Cupcake or muffin cups are the closest modern equivalent, though a yield of 18 from this quantity of batter points to tins rather smaller than a standard modern muffin cup. Fancy tins were small fluted or shaped moulds — mini brioche or madeleine tins work.
- Sour milk and sodaThe half cup of sour milk in the Roxbury cakes is naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the teaspoonful of soda. Use buttermilk, or half a cup of whole milk with a couple of teaspoons of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- Molasses, not blackstrapMolasses of the period was generally lighter than modern blackstrap. Blackstrap is markedly more bitter and less acidic; unsulphured mild molasses gives the intended flavour and a more reliable reaction with the soda.
- A teaspoonful of soda is generousOne full teaspoon to 1 1/2 cups of flour in the Roxbury cakes relies on both the molasses and the sour milk for acid. Substitute sweet milk and you lose part of that acid, and may taste the soda in the finished cake — better to keep the acid in.
- Boiled icingThis is the hot-syrup meringue frosting standard in Boston cookery: sugar syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage, about 238-240F, beaten into stiff egg whites until it holds a peak. It sets with a thin crust and is what gives these small cakes their finished look.
- The Little Gold Cakes are underspecifiedNo method, tin size, temperature or yield is given — the author assumed the reader would follow the Roxbury pattern. Perhaps a dozen small cakes from this quantity, baked in a moderate oven.
- KeepingThe advice about an earthen jar is sound for the Roxbury cakes: the molasses and raisins hold moisture and the spice flavour rounds out over two or three days. An airtight tin does the same job. Frost only what you intend to eat within a day, as boiled icing weeps in storage.
Roxbury was an independent town until it was annexed to Boston in 1868, and its name attached itself to several New England kitchen items, the Roxbury Russet apple most durably; a molasses-and-spice cake carrying the name is the sort of local christening that nineteenth-century domestic writers applied freely and rarely explained. The gold cakes belong to a more traceable convention: gold and silver cakes were a matched pair devised so that a household using yolks in one could use the whites in the other, and they appear side by side in cookbooks throughout the later 1800s. All three recipes here share the habits of their period — level measurements, chemical leavening, and the assumption that a cook who has read the earlier chapters does not need the creaming method spelled out again — and one of them carries an aside about the recipe being easy to divide, with the reassurance that eighteen small cakes will keep.