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Black, or Molasses Cake
1 quart flour. <??> eggs. <??> pint molasses. <??> pound butter. <??> tablespoonfuls ginger. <??> teaspoonful soda, dissolved in 1 teacup sour milk. --Mrs. T.C.
This is a sour-milk gingerbread of the plainest sort, but the surviving text has lost most of its numbers. What follows is what can be said with confidence, and where the gaps are.
- The missing quantitiesMost of the numbers are illegible in the source: the amounts of egg, molasses, butter, ginger and soda are genuinely unknown, though the flour (1 quart) and the sour milk (1 teacup) survive, as do the units for the rest. Nothing here reconstructs the missing figures, and inventing them would be guesswork dressed as scholarship. Treat this as a document rather than a working formula, or use a modern sour-milk gingerbread and read this alongside it.
- A quart of flourThis receipt measures flour by volume, not weight. A quart is 4 cups, somewhere around a pound to a pound and two ounces of modern all-purpose flour depending on how it is scooped; period flour was scooped unsifted and packed differently from ours.
- A teacupThe teacup of nineteenth-century American receipts is smaller than a modern mug. It was never fully standardised, but is commonly reckoned at around 6 fluid ounces.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk means raw milk left to clabber, which was reliably acidic. Pasteurised milk left on the counter spoils rather than sours; buttermilk is the standing substitute, cup for cup. The acid is what activates the soda, and molasses adds acidity of its own.
- "Black" is the molassesThe colour comes entirely from the molasses, not from spice or chocolate. The darker and less refined the molasses, the darker and more bitter the cake; blackstrap will overwhelm the ginger.
- OvenThe receipt gives no oven direction, pan or time at all. A cake of this kind is normally baked moderately, around 350F in a greased loaf or square pan, but that is a modern suggestion rather than anything the receipt says. Molasses browns fast, so it will look done well before the centre is set.
- GingerGround dried ginger is meant, and it loses potency over time. Jarred ginger kept a year or more will be noticeably weaker.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered receipts from named and initialled contributors across the state, which is why this one closes with "Mrs. T.C." rather than a byline. Molasses cake, or black cake, was the everyday sweet of households that bought sugar sparingly: molasses was cheaper, kept indefinitely, and carried its own acidity, which paired with the saleratus or soda that had largely replaced pearlash in American kitchens by mid-century. The pairing of sour milk with soda was the standard chemical leavening of the period, predating reliable commercial baking powder in most rural pantries, and it explains why so many receipts of this era call for milk that a modern cook would throw out. Cakes like this one sat well below the fruited, brandied "black cake" of Christmas baking, despite sharing the name.