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Marble or Bismarck Cake
3 cupfuls white sugar. 1 cupful butter. 1 cupful sour cream, or buttermilk 5 cupfuls flour. Whites of 8 eggs. 1 small spoonful soda. This is for the white batter.
Dark Batter. 2 cupfuls coffee sugar. 1 cupful molasses. 1 cupful sour cream. 1 cupful butter. 5 cupfuls flour. 1 teaspoonful soda. Yolks of 8 eggs, and a whole one. 1 wine-glassful mixed spices, finely powdered. Put in the pan, in alternate layers of light and dark batter. Bake quickly, like sponge cake. Ice and ornament with chocolate drops. This fills a two-pound mould.
Two full-sized butter cakes, one pale and one spiced, spooned into the pan in alternating layers. The batters are chemically similar enough to bake at the same rate, which is the whole trick; the points below cover the units and the few instructions that mislead.
- Coffee sugarA coarse, large-crystal sugar sold for sweetening coffee, often faintly yellow from incomplete refining. Ordinary granulated sugar is the closest match; light brown sugar suits the dark batter's flavour if you want the colour deeper.
- The wine-glassful of spiceA wine glass of the period is about 2 fl oz, or 1/4 cup — an enormous amount of ground spice by modern taste, though it is dividing among five cups of flour. Two to three tablespoons of a cinnamon-clove-nutmeg-allspice blend gives a cake most people will recognise as spiced rather than medicinal.
- Soda and sour creamThe soda is the main leavening, and it needs the acid in genuine sour cream, buttermilk or clabber (the molasses in the dark batter is acidic too). Modern pasteurised sour cream works; sweet cream does not. Period spoon sizes were not standardised, but a level modern teaspoon is a reasonable reading of both the "small spoonful" and the "teaspoonful".
- "Bake quickly, like sponge cake"Take this as a caution against a slow oven rather than a literal instruction; the recipe gives no temperature. A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, is a sensible modern reading for a cake this size, since a very hot oven will set the crust long before ten cups of flour cook through.
- The yield is not two poundsTen cups of flour, five cups of sugar, two cups of butter and nine eggs is on the order of 8-9 lb of batter. "A two-pound mould" cannot be a finished weight; treat it as an error or a very different vessel, and plan on two large tube pans or three 9-inch loaf pans. Expect 60-75 minutes and test with a skewer.
- Marbling techniqueAlternate large spoonfuls, do not stir. If you drag a knife through, one or two passes is the limit — more and both batters go a uniform mud colour, which defeats the point.
- Halving itThe measured ingredients divide cleanly by half; the eggs are the awkward part. Four whites and four yolks, plus one whole egg, gives a workable half batch, though it is slightly more egg than a true half.
- Icing and chocolate dropsNineteenth-century chocolate drops were small moulded sweets, not the modern baking chip. Any plain white or chocolate icing with chocolate buttons or shaved chocolate on top serves the same decorative purpose.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered receipts contributed by some 250 Virginia housekeepers; the book often gives one dish under two names — here a plain descriptive English title beside a fashionable German one. Marble cake is generally associated with the German baking tradition (Marmorkuchen), and the Bismarck label reflects the American fashion for food names honouring Otto von Bismarck in the years around and after the unification of Germany in 1871. The recipe also solves a practical problem of egg-heavy baking: a cook who has used eight whites for a white cake is left with eight yolks, and a dark spiced batter is where they go. Colouring one half of a split batter with molasses and spice was common before cocoa powder became cheap and widely available in American kitchens, which is why many early marble cakes are brown from molasses rather than chocolate.