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An Inexpensive Cake
One cup of black molasses, one-half cup of brown sugar, one-half cup of butter, one cup of hot water, one dessertspoon of soda, two cups of flour, one dessertspoon of spices, using ginger or not, to your taste. This may be used for pudding, or by adding fruit makes a nice fruit cake. Bake in a quick oven.- Mary Miner.
A molasses gingerbread in the plainest possible form — no eggs, no milk, and half the sweetening done by molasses rather than sugar. Two things need attention before you start: the batter is much wetter than a modern cake batter, and "quick oven" is hotter than molasses will tolerate.
- Oven temperatureA quick oven is usually reckoned at somewhere around 400F, though period usage varied and no book fixes it exactly. Molasses scorches easily and this batter is thin enough to need a long bake; 350F is the sensible reading of the instruction for a loaf or square pan. Watch the edges, which darken first.
- DessertspoonA dessertspoon sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon — reckon it at 2 teaspoons. So 2 teaspoons soda and 2 teaspoons mixed spice.
- Black molassesIn this period the term generally meant dark cooking molasses, though it was also used loosely for the cheapest, blackstrap-like grades. Unsulphured dark molasses is the closest match for modern cooks; a very strong blackstrap will read bitter and metallic here.
- The soda is doing all the liftingThere are no eggs and no baking powder. The 2 teaspoons of soda react with the acid in the molasses, so mix and get it into the oven promptly rather than letting the batter stand.
- Batter consistencyOne cup molasses plus one cup hot water against two cups flour gives a pourable, almost soupy batter. That is correct for this style of gingerbread, but it wants a pan with sides — an 8-inch square or a loaf tin, greased and lined — not a shallow layer pan.
- Hot water, added lastHot water -- The recipe gives no mixing order. One workable reading: cream the butter with the sugar and molasses, add the hot water to melt the butter through and thin the molasses, then the flour with the soda and spice.
- "Spices"Period usage means cinnamon, cloves, allspice and nutmeg in some combination, with ginger optional as she says. Two teaspoons total is a firm hand; a mix of one teaspoon cinnamon, half ginger, and the rest cloves and nutmeg is in keeping.
- The pudding and fruit-cake variantsSteamed in a covered mold set in simmering water it becomes a molasses pudding, roughly 1 1/2 to 2 hours. For the fruit version, about a cup to a cup and a half of raisins or currants tossed in a spoonful of the measured flour would suit.
- YieldAbout one 8-inch square pan, 9 to 12 servings. Baked at 350F it will take roughly 35 to 45 minutes; a skewer should come out clean and the center should spring back.
"Inexpensive" is the whole point of the title: molasses was for most of the nineteenth century the cheap sweetener in American kitchens, and a cake built on molasses with only a half cup of sugar, no eggs and no milk was the kind of thing a household could make from the standing pantry at any time of year. Recipes of this shape \— molasses, soda, hot water, spice \— descend from the long tradition of English gingerbread, but the soda and the boiling water reflect nineteenth-century practice, once saleratus and then bicarbonate of soda became reliably available and cooks learned that molasses supplied the acid to set it working. The recipe carries a contributor's name rather than a test-kitchen imprimatur, so what survives here is one woman's household formula, which explains the loose measures and the note to spice it to your own taste.