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Molasses Cake
1 cup sugar 1 cup molasses 1 cup butter (No. 2) 4 cups Five Roses flour 1 cup sour milk 1 teaspoon soda Spice of all kinds Fruit (if desired).
An ingredient list in the shorthand of a flour-company book, which assumed the cook knew what to do with it. The hinge is the sour milk and soda: they are the only leavening, so the batter goes into the pan and into the oven without delay.
- "Butter (No. 2)"Not a quantity, and it cannot be resolved from the recipe alone; it may be a cross-reference or a stray recipe-number. Take it as 1 cup butter, softened, and creamed with the sugar.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Use 1 cup buttermilk, or 1 cup whole milk with 1 tablespoon lemon juice or white vinegar stirred in and left five minutes.
- SodaBaking soda, sifted with the flour rather than dropped into the milk, so it disperses evenly. One teaspoon against a cup of buttermilk and a cup of molasses is about right; more will give a soapy taste and a dark, coarse crumb.
- MolassesUse ordinary dark cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will overwhelm the spice. Warm it slightly so it blends into the creamed butter without seizing.
- "Spice of all kinds"Ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and allspice are the spices commonly found in molasses cakes of this sort. Around 2 teaspoons total, weighted toward ginger and cinnamon, suits this quantity of batter.
- FruitIf used, 1 to 1 1/2 cups raisins or currants, tossed with a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- No eggsThe recipe genuinely has none. Expect a dense, moist, close-grained cake closer to gingerbread than to a layer cake, and do not beat the batter hard once the flour is in.
- Oven and panThe recipe gives no oven direction; 350F works. This makes a large batter: two 9x5-inch loaf pans, about 50 to 60 minutes, or a 9x13-inch pan, about 40 to 45 minutes. Test with a skewer, as the dark colour tells you nothing about doneness.
- KeepingMolasses cakes improve after a day wrapped closely, when the crumb softens and the spice settles.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to sell its flour, and it collected recipes contributed by housewives across Canada, printed in the compressed form that assumed a reader who had made cake before. A molasses cake belonged to the thrifty end of the baking repertoire: molasses was cheaper than refined sugar and shipped well, and sour milk was simply what happened to raw milk in a pantry before mechanical refrigeration, so a recipe that used both turned two cheap or nearly spent ingredients into a keeping cake. The soda-and-sour-milk pairing had been standard in North American home baking since the mid-nineteenth century, when saleratus and then bicarbonate of soda became reliably available; the vagueness of "spice of all kinds" and "fruit (if desired)" reflects a household that spiced according to what was in the cupboard rather than to a formula.