Marble Cake
teaspoon cinnamon teaspoon nutmeg + teaspoon salt 1½ cups of flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 tablespoon molasses Cream butter; add sugar, yolks of eggs beaten until thick, flour in which baking powder has been sifted, alternately with milk and egg whites, beaten until stiff. To one third of this mixture add the spices. Pour into pan the light and dark mixtures irregularly. 3 egg yolks 1½ cups sugar cup water + teaspoon salt
A spice-marbled butter cake of the older type, where the dark swirl comes from molasses and spices rather than chocolate. Several quantities in the ingredient list are incomplete, so read the points below before you shop.
- Missing quantitiesThe list as printed gives no amount for butter or the egg whites, and the fractions on the cinnamon, nutmeg, salt and on the 'cup water' have been lost. The ingredient list names water while the method says milk, so the liquid is uncertain. Something on the order of 1/2 cup butter, about 1/2 cup liquid, the whites of the same 3 eggs and 1/2 teaspoon each of the spices would suit a cake of this size, but all of that is guesswork, not stated.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A butter cake of this kind bakes at 350F, roughly 40 to 45 minutes in a loaf pan or 30 to 35 in a shallow 8-inch square, until a skewer comes out clean.
- The hinge: marble, do not blendSpoon the pale and spiced batters into the pan in alternating dollops and give them no more than one or two passes with a knife. Any real stirring turns the whole thing a uniform muddy tan and you lose the point of the cake.
- Molasses in the dark thirdThe tablespoon of molasses is there for colour as much as flavour. Use unsulphured baking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will darken the swirl to near black.
- LeaveningThree teaspoons of baking powder to 1 1/2 cups of flour is heavy by current practice, where roughly a teaspoon per cup is usual. Two teaspoons gives a cleaner crumb and less of a chemical aftertaste.
- Folding orderAdding flour alternately with milk and then folding in the stiff whites last is the standard sequence. Fold the whites in with a spatula in three additions; beating them in flattens them and the cake bakes dense.
- YieldAbout one 8x4-inch loaf, or an 8-inch square, serving eight to ten.
Marble cake reached American cookbooks well before chocolate was cheap enough to waste on a swirl, and the earliest versions marbled a plain butter batter with a portion darkened by molasses, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace or cloves, exactly as here. Nineteenth-century recipes often called the two batters simply "light" and "dark." The chocolate version eventually displaced the spiced one, and a spiced marble cake now reads as the antique.