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Parson's Cake
5 eggs. 1 large teacupful brown sugar. 4 cupfuls flour. 3 cupfuls molasses. 1 1/2 cupful butter. Ginger and spice to the taste. 1 teaspoonful soda, dissolved in a little milk. Bake.--Mrs D.R.
A molasses gingerbread in the old style: enormous, vaguely measured, and with no oven instruction at all. The proportions work, but you have to supply the temperature, the pan and the spice weights yourself.
- Teacupful vs. cupfulA 19th-century teacup is usually reckoned at somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a modern cup, so the "large teacupful" of brown sugar is probably around 3/4 to 1 cup. The "cupfuls" of flour, molasses and butter are best treated as full cups, near enough to modern measure.
- This is a very large batterFour cups flour and three cups molasses, with the butter, sugar and eggs, give something close to three quarts of batter. Expect two 9x5 loaf pans or a 13x9 sheet, or halve the whole thing.
- Oven"Bake" is all the book offers, so the temperature is yours to supply. Molasses cakes scorch, so a moderate 325-350F is a reasonable choice, roughly 45-55 minutes for loaves and 35-40 for a sheet pan; a skewer should come out with a few moist crumbs.
- Soda, not baking powderThe teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the molasses; that pairing is the chemical leavening, with whatever additional lift the five eggs and the creamed butter provide. Dissolve it in a tablespoon or two of milk as directed and fold it in last, then get the pans into the oven promptly.
- Molasses to useUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what a Virginia kitchen would have had on hand. Sorghum syrup is a reasonable period-appropriate stand-in.
- "Ginger and spice to the taste"For this quantity of batter, start with 1 tablespoon ground ginger and 2 teaspoons total of cinnamon, cloves and allspice. "Spice" in these books may mean allspice specifically or simply a mixed sweet spice, whatever the cook kept in the box.
- ButterCream the butter and sugar first, then the eggs, then alternate flour and molasses. The recipe assumes a cook who knows this; it lists ingredients rather than method.
- KeepingMolasses cakes improve after a day wrapped tightly, and hold a week. Serve plain in thick slices, with tea or a glass of milk.
Cakes named for the parson turn up in 19th-century American cookery, usually meaning a plain, sturdy, spiced molasses cake; the connection to a call from the minister is traditional explanation rather than documented fact. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housewives, is full of such initialled attributions, and the terseness here is characteristic: the contributors wrote for women who already knew how to build a cake and needed only the proportions. The reliance on molasses rather than white sugar suggests economy as much as taste, and the single teaspoon of soda dissolved in milk places the recipe in the decades when soda-and-acid leavening was ordinary in home kitchens, though commercial baking powder was already available by the 1870s.