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Marble Cake
LIGHT PART 1 cup white sugar ½ cup butter ½ cup sweet milk ½ teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon cream of tartar 3 eggs (whites beaten stiff) 2 cups Five Roses flour.
Mix all together and beat.
DARK PART 1 cup brown sugar ½ cup butter ½ cup molasses ½ cup sour milk ¾ teaspoon soda (dissolved in milk) 1 teaspoon cloves ½ teaspoon nutmeg 3 eggs (yolks beaten stiff) 2½ cups Five Roses flour.
Mix all together and beat dark part stiffer than white part.
When each part is ready, drop a spoonful of dark, then a spoonful of light batter over the bottom of baking dish; and proceed so until you fill the pan. Be quick or cake will be heavy. Bake in hot oven. 1 egg
Two full cakes' worth of batter, spooned together into one pan. The old marble cake marbles molasses and spice against a plain white cake, not chocolate against vanilla.
- The hinge: consistency, not speedConsistency as well as speed -- the recipe warns "Be quick or cake will be heavy," but it also tells you to beat the dark part stiffer than the light. If the dark batter is as slack as the light, the two will tend to bleed together into a uniform brown; holding back a little of the sour milk will stiffen it.
- Sweet milk and sour milkSweet milk is plain fresh whole milk. Sour milk is naturally clabbered milk; cultured buttermilk is the standard substitute and gives the acid the soda needs in the dark part.
- Soda and cream of tartarThe light part's ½ teaspoon soda plus 1 teaspoon cream of tartar is a homemade baking powder. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder does the same work if you would rather not keep cream of tartar.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no temperature, and period cookbooks generally put a hot oven somewhere above 400F. A cake using the full 4½ cups of flour will scorch at that heat; 350F is the practical modern setting, allowing roughly 60-75 minutes for a large tube pan.
- Pan and yieldThe recipe specifies only a "baking dish." The combined batters are enough for something on the scale of a 10-inch tube pan or two 9-inch loaf pans.
- Mixing "all together"The instruction is bare. Creaming butter and sugar first, then eggs and liquid, then flour, is the usual reading for a cake of this type; the stiffly beaten whites in the light part are better folded in at the end than beaten, though the recipe does not say so.
- The stray "1 egg"The line at the end belongs to no step in either part, and there is no way to tell what it was meant for. Ignore it.
- SpicesA full teaspoon of cloves is assertive by current taste. Cut it to half if you want the molasses to lead.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as a promotional book tied to purchases of Five Roses flour, which is why the brand name appears inside the ingredient list rather than on the cover alone; it was among the most widely distributed household books in Canada in the years around the First World War. Marble cake of this kind predates the chocolate version most people now picture: the dark half took its colour and flavour from molasses, brown sugar and cloves, a spicing often associated with German-American baking, where sour milk and soda were everyday leavening. The division of the eggs is also tidy in itself - three eggs separated give whites to lighten one batter and yolks to enrich the other, with nothing left over.