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Molasses Cake
5 light cupfuls flour. 5 eggs. 2 cupfuls sugar. 2 cupfuls molasses. 1 cupful butter. 1 cupful cream, with one teaspoonful soda. 2 tablespoonfuls cream of tartar. 2 teaspoonfuls ground ginger. All well beaten together. Bake as pound cake.--Miss E.T Molasses Cake. 1 teaspoonful soda. 1 pound butter. 1 pound sugar. 1 pint molasses. 1 tablespoonful ginger. Stir enough to make it as thick as ordinary cake.--Miss
Two versions appear here under one heading, and only the first is complete. Treat the second as a fragment: it lists no flour and no liquid beyond the molasses, and the instruction to "stir enough to make it as thick as ordinary cake" assumes a cook who already knows the proportion.
- Bake as pound cakeThat means a slow, steady oven; the book gives no temperatures, but around 325F suits, in a greased and floured tube pan or two loaf pans. A full batch of the first recipe is large — expect roughly 1 to 1 1/4 hours for loaves and longer again for a tube pan; test with a skewer at the centre.
- The leavening is unbalanced as printedThe leavening looks unbalanced as printed -- one teaspoon of soda against two tablespoons of cream of tartar is a great deal of acid, and molasses is itself acidic. A modern cook might use about 1 1/2 teaspoons soda in total and drop the cream of tartar altogether.
- "Light cupfuls"A cupful filled lightly rather than packed; taken at roughly 4 oz, five cups is about 20 oz or 570 g. Spoon the flour into the cup rather than dipping if you want to land near the original.
- CreamCream in a nineteenth-century household may well have been slightly soured, which would help explain the soda stirred into it, though the recipe does not say so. Buttermilk gives a closer result than modern sweet heavy cream; either works, but buttermilk with soda will lift better.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses rather than blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter. Two cups is a heavy dose of sugar in its own right, so the cake will be dark, moist and quite sweet.
- Mixing"All well beaten together" understates it for a pound-cake method. Cream the butter and sugar until pale, beat in the eggs one at a time, then alternate flour with the cream and molasses. Dumping everything in at once gives a dense, greasy crumb.
- The second recipeA pound of butter, a pound of sugar and a pint of molasses with no stated flour or eggs cannot be reconstructed with confidence. If you want a second version, use the first and add ginger to taste.
- YieldThe first recipe makes a large cake — two 9-inch loaves or one big tube cake, on the order of 16 to 20 slices. It keeps well wrapped for several days.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (first published 1878; later printings dated 1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries end in a signature like "Miss E.T.", and duplicates under one heading were often left standing rather than reconciled. Molasses cake sits in the long American line of dark spiced cakes descended from English gingerbread: molasses was the cheap sweetener of the Atlantic trade, present in Southern pantries in quantity long after refined loaf sugar became affordable, and it carried both sweetness and the acidity that made soda leavening work. The instruction to "bake as pound cake" is a good marker of the period's expectations — a compiler could assume readers knew the creaming method and the slow oven without being told.