Coffee Cake
One cup of brown sugar One-fourth cup of butter Two eggs One-half cup of strong infusion of Larkin Coffee One-fourth teaspoon of Larkin Table Salt One-half teaspoon of Larkin Soda One teaspoon of Larkin Ginger One cup of sugar
This is an ingredient list rather than a full recipe, and as printed it is incomplete: there is no flour and no method. What follows explains the shorthand and flags what is missing, so the list can be read against a comparable coffee gingerbread.
- The missing flourA batter of sugar, butter, two eggs and half a cup of liquid has no structure without flour. Cakes of this size and type in the period took roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of flour; the exact figure is not recoverable from the page, so this cannot be assembled as written without borrowing a method from another recipe.
- Two sugarsOne cup brown and one cup white is a great deal of sugar for a cake of this size, and one of the two lines may be a compositor's substitution for flour. Read it with suspicion rather than doubling the sweetness on faith.
- Larkin ingredientsThe brand names are advertising. Larkin Soda is baking soda, Larkin Table Salt is salt, Larkin Ginger is ground dried ginger. Any modern equivalent works in the same quantity.
- Strong infusion of coffeeThis means brewed coffee at double strength, cooled, not coffee grounds and not espresso powder. Half a cup of strong drip coffee is the nearest modern reading.
- Soda without acidHalf a teaspoon of soda needs something acidic to work against. Coffee and brown sugar are mildly acidic and would have carried it, but the rise will be modest; comparable spice and gingerbread cakes commonly used sour milk or molasses, neither of which appears here.
- OvenNo baking direction survives on the page. If reconstructed with a borrowed method, a moderate oven (around 350F) in a greased 8-inch square or round pan is the conventional modern equivalent, but the time cannot be derived from this list and must be judged by a tester.
- YieldWith flour missing, the yield cannot be worked out from the page; a batter of this size would fill roughly one 8-inch layer. It reads as a plain spice cake.
Good Things to Eat came out of the Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, the soap manufacturer founded by John D. Larkin in 1875 that grew into a vast mail-order house selling groceries, coffee, spices and household goods direct to families, with premiums thrown in. Cookbooks like this one were sales literature: every ingredient carries the company name, so that a woman following the recipe was reminded four times in eight lines whose coffee, salt, soda and ginger to reorder. The cake itself belongs to the large American family of coffee-and-spice cakes -- not the German Kaffeekuchen served with coffee, but a cake with brewed coffee in the batter, a thrifty way to darken and flavour a plain cake using what was already in the pot. The compressed, punctuation-free ingredient list and the absent method are typical of promotional booklets, which assumed a cook who already knew how to cream butter and sugar and did not need telling.