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Soft Ginger Cake
1 cupful butter. 1 cupful sugar. 1 cupful molasses. 1 cupful sour cream. 3 eggs. 1/2 tablespoonful of soda. 2 tablespoonfuls of ginger. Flour until the spoon will almost stand alone. Cloves and cinnamon to taste. (This is very good.)--Mrs. J. F.
A soft molasses gingerbread of the sour-cream-and-soda school, given in the shorthand of a cook who never measured flour. The only real judgment call is the flour, and the batter should be thick but still droppable, not stiff.
- "Flour until the spoon will almost stand alone"The recipe gives no quantity, and none can be recovered from the text; something in the region of 4 cups of all-purpose flour is a reasonable starting guess, but the spoon test governs. Add it in stages and stop when a spoon pushed upright in the batter leans slowly rather than falling over; an overfloured batter bakes dry and tough.
- Half a tablespoonful of sodaThat is 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking soda. It has both the sour cream and the molasses to work against, so cutting it back is likely to leave the cake denser and more sour.
- Sour creamSour cream of this period would generally have been cultured raw cream, often thinner and sharper than the modern tub. Full-fat commercial sour cream works but is stiffer; thin it with a spoonful or two of milk, or use buttermilk, bearing in mind that buttermilk is thinner and much lower in fat.
- MolassesUse unsulphured baking molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what this cook would have had. Sorghum syrup is also period-appropriate and slightly milder.
- Two tablespoonfuls of gingerGenuinely a lot of dried ginger, and intentional in a cake called soft ginger cake. Older ground ginger loses punch fast, so if yours has been open a year the full amount is about right; with fresh, potent ginger you may prefer to start at one tablespoon.
- Oven and panBake at 350F. A 9x13 pan takes about 35 to 45 minutes; two 9-inch rounds or a tube pan will differ. Molasses cakes brown deceptively early, so judge by a tester in the center rather than the top.
- Order of workCream butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then the molasses, then alternate flour with the sour cream and stir the soda into the last of the cream. Once the soda meets the acid, get it into the oven without dawdling.
- YieldAbout 12 to 16 squares. It improves on the second day, wrapped, as molasses cakes usually do.
Soft gingerbread was the everyday cake of American households well into the twentieth century, cheap because molasses cost a fraction of refined sugar and forgiving because soda and sour milk raised it without yeast or long beating. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, and this entry shows the format at its most characteristic: initials instead of a name, no oven instruction, no baking time, and a flour measure expressed as a test of the spoon rather than a quantity. Such recipes were written to remind a cook who already knew the dish, not to teach one who did not. The parenthetical endorsement, "This is very good," is the closest thing the book offers to a review, and it appears often enough to suggest the editor let her contributors vouch for themselves.