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Molasses Layer Cake
½ C molasses Spices 1 t soda ¾ C sugar Yolks 2 eggs Butter size of egg 1/2 C hot water Dissolve soda in molasses. Flour as much as can be stirred in. Last add ½ C hot water. If too thin, add a little more flour. Makes two layers. Use whites for frosting. 6 eggs 1 C sugar 4 t lemon juice Mrs. B. H. Whitman.
A typewritten community-cookbook entry, compressed to the point of shorthand: the flour is never measured and the frosting is reduced to three ingredients with no method. What follows fills the gaps without changing the batter.
- The trailing fragmentThe sugar quantity was checked against the printed page and reads three-quarters of a cup, balancing the half cup of molasses. The trailing "6 eggs 1 C sugar 4 t lemon juice" is a separate fragment; whether it is a frosting or the opening of another recipe is unclear, but it is not part of the cake batter.
- Butter size of eggA standard nineteenth-century measure: about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Cream it with the sugar before the molasses goes in.
- Flour, unmeasured"As much as can be stirred in" is genuinely open. For this quantity of liquid expect somewhere between 1¾ and 2¼ cups of all-purpose flour; stop at a batter that mounds on the spoon but still drops from it, since the hot water thins it further.
- Soda in molassesDissolving the teaspoon of soda directly in the molasses is the leavening system — no baking powder here. The mixture foams; get it into the pans and the oven promptly, because the lift starts at once.
- SpicesUnspecified, as often in books of this kind. A workable reading is 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon ginger and 1/4 teaspoon each cloves and nutmeg.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no oven direction at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, in two greased 8-inch round pans for 20 to 25 minutes, until the centers spring back, is a modern reading. Molasses browns fast, so judge by touch rather than color.
- The frosting fragmentThe text reads "6 eggs," not six whites; with a cup of sugar and lemon juice it may describe an uncooked meringue-style icing, though the method is missing. If read that way, raw whites are the concern, and a boiled icing or pasteurized whites answers it. Note also that the cake itself yields only two spare whites.
- YieldTwo thin layers, serving eight to ten. The layers are shallow by modern expectation — this is a tea cake rather than a birthday cake.
Molasses stayed in American baking long after refined sugar became cheap, partly from habit and partly because the soda-and-molasses reaction was a reliable leavener in kitchens that distrusted or could not afford baking powder. Layer cakes of this kind -- two thin rounds, a boiled or meringue icing between and over -- were common fare at church suppers and socials, and community cookbooks of this type existed largely to collect them under their contributors' names. The extreme brevity is typical of the genre: these books were compiled from contributors' own written recipes by cooks who assumed the reader already knew how a cake batter should look, which is why the flour goes unmeasured and the spices unnamed.