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Coontown Cake
¾ cup brown sugar ½ cup sour milk ½ cup butter ½ cup molasses ¾ cup washed currants 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon mixed spice 2 cups (rounding) Five Roses flour Bake in 2 layers. Date filling and chocolate icing sprinkled with walnuts.
A plain molasses-and-spice layer cake of the eggless, sour-milk type, given in the shorthand a 1915 cook was expected to fill in for herself. The whole thing hinges on the sour milk reacting with the soda, so the batter should go into the pans and into the oven promptly.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, not spoiled pasteurized milk. Substitute buttermilk, or stir 1½ teaspoons of lemon juice or white vinegar into ½ cup of whole milk and let it stand five minutes.
- SodaOne teaspoon of baking soda, not baking powder. Sift it with the flour rather than dumping it in wet, or you will get brown flecks and a soapy taste in the crumb.
- Mixed spiceA British and Canadian blend, roughly cinnamon with nutmeg, allspice, cloves and sometimes ginger and coriander. Pumpkin pie spice is the nearest supermarket equivalent; a teaspoon total is right.
- "2 cups (rounding)"A rounded cup is heaped slightly above the rim, not levelled off — call it about 2¼ cups, or 285 g of all-purpose flour. Five Roses was a hard-wheat bread-style flour, so a modern all-purpose gives a comparable crumb; cake flour will be too tender for this heavy batter.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. "Washed" means rinsed of packing grit and drained; toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- Oven and pansNo temperature is given; the book left the heat to the cook's own judgement. Two 8-inch round pans at 350°F, 22 to 28 minutes, until a tester comes out clean. Molasses and brown sugar brown fast, so check the edges early.
- MixingCream the butter with the brown sugar, beat in the molasses, then add the flour mixture and sour milk alternately. There are no eggs, so the structure comes entirely from the soda and the flour — do not overbeat once the flour is in.
- Filling and finishingThe date filling is simply pitted dates simmered with a little water and sugar to a spreadable paste and cooled. Chocolate icing of this period was usually a simple confectioners'-sugar-and-cocoa or melted-chocolate glaze rather than a modern buttercream.
- YieldOne 8-inch two-layer cake, 8 to 10 servings. It keeps better than a butter-and-egg cake and is arguably better on the second day.
The name is a relic of its moment and an ugly one: North American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries routinely attached minstrel-show and blackface vocabulary to any dark-colored cake, alongside the equally common "Devil's Food" and "Chocolate Loaf." What the recipe actually describes is a much older and more respectable thing — a molasses layer cake leavened with sour milk and soda, the standard economical cake of a household where eggs were seasonal and expensive and a crock of soured milk was always at hand. Five Roses flour was milled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, and the Five Roses Cook Book, first issued in 1913 and compiled from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, was distributed in enormous numbers as advertising; the terse, ingredient-list style of this entry is typical of contributed recipes printed nearly as received, on the assumption that any reader already knew how to cream butter and judge her own oven.