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Tumbler Cake
2 tumblers of brown sugar 1 tumbler butter 1 tumbler molasses 1 tumbler sweet milk 5 tumblers Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons (small) soda 1 teaspoon cloves 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon nutmeg.
Above makes a good fruit cake by adding 1 pint raisins and 1 cup currants.
A large gingerbread-style spice cake measured entirely by drinking glass, with no eggs, no oven temperature and no baking time given. The proportions work, but you supply the missing half of the instructions.
- What a tumbler holdsA kitchen tumbler of this period is generally reckoned at 8 fl oz, so read each tumbler as 1 cup. That gives roughly 2 cups brown sugar, 1 cup each butter, molasses and milk, and 5 cups flour — a very large cake. Halving the whole thing is reasonable for a single 9x13 pan.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured milk, specified because sour milk and buttermilk were the ordinary alternatives and behave differently with soda. Whole milk is the equivalent.
- Soda and the acidThe two small teaspoons of soda are there to react with the molasses, which is acidic (brown sugar is only mildly so and contributes little). Replacing the molasses with light corn syrup removes the acid, so the cake will rise poorly and can taste of unreacted soda. Sift the soda through the flour rather than dumping it into the batter.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring wheat flour, milled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company. The nearest modern equivalent is Canadian all-purpose, which is somewhat higher in protein than US all-purpose; either will work, though a US all-purpose gives a slightly softer crumb.
- No eggsThe recipe is genuinely eggless, which was common in molasses cakes. It produces a dense, moist, close-grained crumb rather than a light one — that is the intended result, not a fault.
- Oven and timeA cake of this weight and sugar content wants a moderate oven, 325-350F, and burns easily because of the molasses. In a 9x13 pan expect 45-55 minutes; in two loaf pans, 55-65. Test with a skewer at the centre.
- The fruit versionA pint of raisins is about 10-11 oz by weight, a cup of currants about 5 oz. Toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in, or they sink. The fruited version needs the lower end of the temperature and another 15 minutes or so.
- Butter temperatureNo method is given. Creaming the butter with the brown sugar first, then beating in molasses and milk, then the dry ingredients, is the safest reading; butter straight from cold will resist creaming and the batter may curdle.
- Yield and keepingThe full quantity serves about 20. Like most molasses cakes it improves on the second day, wrapped; the fruited version keeps a week.
Recipes measured by tumbler, teacup or wineglass belonged to kitchens without a graduated measuring cup, and they survived in print well into the era of standardised measures because home cooks copied them out of family notebooks and sent them to flour companies. The Five Roses Cook Book, issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed with sacks of its flour, was largely built from such contributed recipes, which is why its measurements are so uneven from page to page. The cake itself belongs to the broad North American family of molasses spice cakes — economical, eggless, heavily spiced with cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg — that stretched expensive imported spice and cheap dark sweetener into something festive. The note that fruit turns it into "a good fruit cake" reflects the ordinary practice of the time: one dependable batter, dressed up or left plain according to what the pantry held.