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Cake: Gingerbread
1/2 cupful milk, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK Gingerbread with Chocolate Glaze. cupful butter, 1 cupful sugar, 3 cupfuls flour, to forty minutes. If directions are followed, this makes a most satisfactory cake; but if the ingredients are added separately, it will not prove a success.-FANNIE M. FARMER.
Black Angel Cake. 1 cupful Runkel's Chocolate bicarbonate of 1 cupful dark molasses, 1 cupful black coffee, 1 teaspoonful ginger, ½ teaspoonful cloves, 1 teaspoonful soda, 3 eggs.
Mix the spices with the molasses.
Dissolve the soda in a little boiling water and add to the coffee.
Cream the butter and sugar, add the eggs, one at a time, and beat each one well.
Add the molasses, then the coffee and flour, a little at a time, alternately.
Bake in bread tins in a moderate oven forty to sixty minutes, or until the cake leaves the sides of the pans.
Gingerbread with Whipped Cream.
Use the gingerbread recipe given above, substituting a cupful boiling water for the coffee and using half butter and half lard; or 2 cupfuls molasses may be used, and the sugar omitted. In the latter case 2 teaspoonfuls soda instead of one should be dissolved in a cupful boiling water. Serve the cake very fresh, and cover the top just before serving with whipped cream. The cake may be broken into squares, and the pieces fitted together and covered entirely with whipped cream. It can then be served as a dessert.-MARY RONALD.
Quick Cake. cupful soft butter, 1⅓ cupfuls brown sugar, 2 eggs, cupful milk, 1¾ cupfuls flour, 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder, teaspoonful cinnamon, teaspoonful grated nutmeg, pound dates stoned and cut in pieces.
The workable recipe here is the dark molasses-and-coffee gingerbread, baked in loaf tins and finished either with a chocolate glaze or with whipped cream. A few of the quantities need interpretation before you start.
- The butter quantity is unclearThe fat measure has lost its fraction and reads only "cupful butter." With 3 cupfuls flour and a cupful each of sugar, molasses and coffee, 1/2 cupful (4 oz) butter is the most likely reading; a full cup would be very rich.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. The cake is done when it leaves the sides of the pans and a skewer comes out clean.
- Bread tinsTwo loaf pans of roughly 9x5 inches, greased and floured. Note that the recipe makes squares by breaking up the baked loaf rather than by baking in a square pan.
- Soda and molassesThe soda is dissolved in a little boiling water and stirred into the coffee, not into the flour. Use unsulphured dark molasses (not blackstrap, which is bitter) so the teaspoonful of soda has something to work against.
- Alternating wet and dryMolasses first, then coffee and flour a little at a time, alternately, as the recipe directs.
- The whipped-cream variationBoiling water replaces the coffee, and half the butter is replaced with lard. If you take the all-molasses option (2 cupfuls molasses, no sugar), the soda doubles to 2 teaspoonfuls, dissolved in a cupful of boiling water, to handle the extra acid.
- ServingThe cream-covered version must be assembled at the last minute; the recipe specifies covering the top just before serving.
Molasses gingerbread was the everyday American cake of the nineteenth century, cheap where butter and refined sugar were dear, and it survived into printed cookbooks of the 1900s largely unchanged. The coffee in this version is a late refinement: brewed coffee deepens the colour and sharpens the spice without adding sweetness, a trick that also shows up in period devil's food and spice cakes. The attributions here are worth noting for what they say about the era's cooking authorities. Fannie Merritt Farmer of the Boston Cooking School and Mary Ronald, author of The Century Cook Book, were both widely reprinted, and household compilations of the period routinely credited such names in the manner of a byline. The insistence that the ingredients be combined in the stated order rather than "added separately" reflects the same standardizing impulse that made Farmer famous for level measurements.