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Cookies, Cakes, and Doughnuts: Beat
Beat the butter and sugar until smooth. Add the milk, soda dissolved in a little warm water, then the flour, which has been sifted twice with the baking powder. Add the eggs well beaten. Stir thoroughly and add the chocolate. This makes three goodsized layers. Filling - 2 cupfuls brown sugar, & cupful butter, cup- COOKIES, CAKES, AND DOUGHNUTS ful sweet milk. Boil until it will thread, and spread between layers. If a very large cake is desired, two white layers may be added flavored with orange Training-Day Ginger Cake. cupful butter, 1 cupful granulated sugar 1 egg, 1 cupful New Orleans molasses, 1 cupful sour milk, 1 teaspoonful soda, 3 cupfuls pastry flour, 1 tablespoonful ginger Beat the butter to a cream, add the sugar and egg well beaten, the molasses, then the sour milk, to which the soda has been added and both stirred until the milk foams and there are no lumps remaining. Sift the flour and ginger, beat thoroughly, and turn into a shallow baking pan. Bake in a moderate oven; when it is well done, remove from the oven and spread with a thick layer of raw molasses. Return to the oven for short time till the coating of the molasses has set, when the cake may be cut into squares.
Crumb Gingerbread 1 teaspoonful soda, 4 cupfuls flour, 1 cupful butter, 2 cupfuls sugar, 1 cupful sour milk, 2 eggs, grated nutmeg, teaspoonful cinnamon, 1 teaspoonful ginger. a Rub the flour and butter together until they are reduced to crumbs, as flour and lard are worked together for pie crust; then add the sugar and stir this in till the mixture is once more crumbly. Measure out 2 cupfuls crumbs, and set away in a cold place until the batter is made. Into what remains of the crumbs stir in two well-beaten eggs, and add the sour milk and soda. When the soda is dissolved and the milk foams, turn it into the mixing bowl with the rest.
Add to the batter the nutmeg, cinnamon, and ginger. Butter a dripping pan and measure out 1 cupful crumbs that was set aside; spread evenly on the bottom of the pan, pour the batter over them as evenly as possible; spread the rest of the crumbs on top, and bake in a moderately hot oven; when done, cut into squares, and keep in a closely covered jar.
Aunt Dinah's Cake. + cupful butter, cupful sugar, cupful molasses, 2 cupfuls flour, cupful sour milk, ½ teaspoonful ginger, teaspoonful salt, 1 teaspoonful cinnamon, teaspoonful soda, + nutmeg grated, Juice and rind lemon, 1 egg.
Beat the butter and sugar to a cream, add the spices, lemon, and molasses. Dissolve the soda in 1 tablespoonful cold water, and stir into the sour milk. Add this and the egg well beaten, then the flour, and beat briskly. Pour into a well-buttered pan, and bake in a moderate oven fifty minutes. This cake will keep moist some time. One half cupful stoned raisins and cupful currants may be stirred lightly into the batter just before it is put in the pan, if you wish a fruit cake.
Blackberry-Jam Cake. cupful butter, cupful sugar, 1 cupful flour, cupful stoned raisins, cupful blackberry jam, 2 tablespoonfuls sour cream or milk, teaspoonful soda, nutmeg grated, 2 eggs.
Beat the butter to a cream, then beat in the sugar. When very light, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK beat in the jam and nutmeg. Dissolve the soda in 1 tablespoonful cold water, and add it to the sour cream.
Add this and the egg well beaten to the other ingredients. Now add the flour and beat for half a minute.
Sprinkle a tablespoonful flour over the raisins, and stir them in lightly.
Four cakes and a boiled filling sit side by side here, all built on the same late-Victorian pattern: creamed butter, sour milk, and soda. A few working notes before you start.
- The missing fractionsMost of the butter, sugar, milk and spice quantities in these lists have lost their fractions, so they read "cupful butter" where the original almost certainly said a half or a quarter. The page cannot tell you which. Half a cup of butter to a cup of sugar is a common proportion for a cake of this type and is a reasonable starting guess for the ginger cake, Aunt Dinah's cake and the jam cake, but it is a guess, not what the book says.
- Oven temperaturesA "moderate oven" in this period is usually reckoned at roughly 350F, "moderately hot" (as for the crumb gingerbread) at around 375F, though the book gives no figures and such equivalents are approximate. Molasses and brown-sugar batters scorch on the bottom, so bake on a middle rack and check a shallow pan early.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally clabbered raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Modern pasteurised milk only spoils; use buttermilk, or a cup of milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes. The instruction to stir until the milk foams and no lumps remain is worth following literally, since undissolved soda leaves bitter yellow specks.
- New Orleans molassesLouisiana cane molasses, generally unsulphured and reckoned a better grade than the darker West Indian sorts; nothing like as harsh as blackstrap. Regular unsulphured molasses is the closest match. The "raw molasses" spread on the hot ginger cake is simply molasses straight from the jug, spread thin and returned to the oven briefly, as the recipe says, until the coating sets.
- The boiled fillingTwo cups brown sugar with butter and milk boiled "until it will thread" is the thread stage, roughly 230-235F on a thermometer, or the point where a drizzle from the spoon draws a thread. Take it off the heat and beat briefly before spreading, or it will run off the layers.
- Pastry flourSofter and lower in protein than modern all-purpose. The usual substitute is about half all-purpose and half cake flour. It matters most in the ginger cake, the only one here that calls for it, which is meant to be tender rather than chewy.
- Dripping panA shallow rectangular roasting pan. For the crumb gingerbread a 9x13-inch pan is a reasonable choice; the recipe reserves two cups of crumbs, one cupful for the bottom and the rest on top.
- YieldEach of the shallow cakes gives roughly 16 to 20 squares from a 9x13 pan. The layer cake makes three layers the book calls "good-sized," but its ingredient list is missing from this page, so the pan size cannot be recovered. Aunt Dinah's cake, the book says, will keep moist for some time.
Ginger cake made with sour milk, soda and molasses was the plainest sweet baking a nineteenth-century American household did: no fine white sugar required, and it improved for a day or two in a covered jar. The name here points to the New England militia muster or "training day," a spring and autumn fixture when whole towns turned out and hawkers sold gingerbread and cider at the field; the association of ginger cake with training day is a well-attested piece of New England custom. The crumb gingerbread and blackberry-jam cake belong to the same thrifty tradition, the jam cake in particular being a way to spend down last summer's preserves before the jars turned. Cakes with a boiled brown-sugar filling were the everyday alternative to a butter icing, since they needed only a kettle and a spoon.