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Marble or Spiced Cake
Make up a pound cake and add two teaspoonfuls of yeast powder. Take one-third part of the batter and add to it two teaspoonfuls of cinnamon and mace each, one teaspoonful of cloves and allspice each, one nutmeg finely powdered. Then grease a pan and put in first a layer of the plain batter, then the spiced, alternately, till you have it full, finishing with the plain. Bake as a pound cake.--Mrs. C. V. McG.
MARBLE CAKE. Light Part. 3 cupfuls sugar. 1 cupful butter. 1 cupful sour cream. 5 cupfuls flour. Whites of 8 eggs. 1 teaspoonful soda.
Dark Part. 2 cupfuls brown sugar. 1 cupful molasses. 1 cupful sour cream. 1 cupful butter. 5 cupfuls flour. 1 teaspoonful soda. Yolks of 8 eggs. 1 whole egg. 1 wine-glassful wine. Mixed spices.
Put alternately layers of each kind in two-pound moulds. Marble Cake. Light Part. 1 cupful white sugar. 1/2 cupful butter. 1/2 cupful buttermilk. Whites of 3 eggs. 1 teaspoonful cream tartar. 1/2 teaspoonful soda. 2 cupfuls flour. Dark Part. 1/2 cupful brown sugar. 1/4 cupful butter. 1/2 cupful molasses. 1/4 cupful milk. 1/2 nutmeg. 1 teaspoonful cinnamon. 1/2 teaspoonful allspice. 2 cupfuls flour. 1/2 teaspoonful soda. 1 teaspoonful cream tartar. Yolks of 3 eggs. Put in the mould, alternately, tablespoonfuls of light and dark batter.--Mrs.
Three versions of the same idea, printed one after another: a pale batter and a dark spiced batter layered in one tin. None of them gives an oven temperature or a time, and the first assumes you already know a pound cake by heart.
- Yeast powder is baking powder"Yeast powder" was the period trade name for chemical baking powder, not any kind of yeast. Two teaspoons is right for a full pound cake batter made with four to five cups of flour.
- The pound cake it starts fromThe first recipe presumes the standard formula: equal weights of butter, sugar, eggs and flour, typically a pound of each, with the eggs beaten in whole or the whites folded separately. That is roughly 2 cups butter, 2 1/4 cups sugar, 8-9 eggs and 4 cups flour.
- Sour cream and buttermilkNineteenth-century "sour cream" was raw cream left to clabber, thinner and sharper than the stabilised tub product. Cultured sour cream thinned with a spoonful or two of buttermilk behaves closest to it; the acid is what the soda needs to work against.
- Cream of tartar plus sodaIn the third version the leavening is built by hand: one teaspoon cream of tartar to half a teaspoon soda is the classic ratio and amounts to about two teaspoons of modern baking powder per batter. Do not add baking powder on top of it.
- A wine-glassfulIn these books a wine-glass is about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. The recipe says only "wine"; sherry or Madeira would be plausible choices.
- Two-pound mouldsA "two-pound mould" holds a cake made from about two pounds of batter, near enough to a 9x5 loaf tin. The second recipe is enormous, ten cups of flour and nine eggs (eight of them separated between the two batters), and fills three or four such tins.
- OvenThe book gives no temperature or time. "Bake as a pound cake" implies slow and steady; around 325F works. A large loaf will want 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours, a full tube pan longer; test with a skewer rather than the clock, and tent the top with foil if the dark batter colours too fast.
- MarblingAlternate layers or spoonfuls as directed and give the batter one lazy pass with a knife at most. The two batters here have different sugars and different densities, so overmixing muddies them into a single brown cake instead of a marbled one.
- NutmegA whole nutmeg grated is about two teaspoons. In the first recipe that spicing goes into only a third of the batter, which is why it reads so heavily.
Marble cake reached American kitchens through German baking, where Marmorkuchen is a long-standing form, and in the mid-nineteenth century the dark half was made dark with molasses and spice rather than chocolate, which only became the usual choice later as cocoa grew cheap and reliable. That is why all three of these versions read as spice cakes: brown sugar, molasses, cinnamon, mace, cloves, allspice and nutmeg do the colouring as well as the flavouring. Their appearance here, three of them in a row and credited to different contributors, is typical of Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), which Marion Cabell Tyree assembled from recipes sent in by Virginia housewives and printed largely as received, duplications and all. The scale is worth noting too: eight eggs in one version, nine in the second, from households where eggs and butter came from the yard rather than the store.