Molasses Cake
1/2 cup granulated sugar 1/2 cup butter 1 cup molasses 2 even teaspoons soda 1 cup boiling water 2½ cups sifted flour 1 teaspoon grated nutmeg 1½ teaspoons cinnamon Salt to taste 2 beaten eggs Cream the butter with the sugar and add the molasses; then add the boiling water in which the soda has been dissolved. Measure the flour after it is sifted; stir it into the molasses mixture when that has cooled; add spices and salt and last of all the eggs. Bake in a shallow greased pan in a very slow oven.
A thin-battered molasses sheet cake of the boiling-water type, closer to a soft gingerbread than to a butter cake. Two details in the method carry the whole recipe.
- Let the batter cool before the eggsThe instruction to stir in the eggs last, after the boiling-water mixture has cooled, is the hinge. Add them while the batter is still hot and they set into threads of cooked egg that no amount of beating will smooth out.
- "A very slow oven"In period terms that is 250-300F. For a shallow pan of this thin batter, 325F for 30-35 minutes gives a better result; molasses browns fast and a long slow bake dries the edges before the centre sets.
- The soda is deliberateTwo even teaspoons looks excessive by modern standards, but there is a full cup of molasses here and the soda is neutralising its acidity as well as raising the cake. Dissolve it fully in the boiling water and do not round the spoonfuls up, or the crumb can take on a soapy, metallic edge.
- Molasses to useOrdinary unsulphured cooking molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter and much less sweet, and with only half a cup of sugar in the recipe there is nothing to balance it.
- "Salt to taste"With unsalted butter, half a teaspoon. If the butter is salted, a quarter is enough.
- Measuring the flourThe direction to measure after sifting is not incidental. Sifted-then-measured flour is appreciably lighter than flour scooped straight from the bag -- somewhere around 10 oz / 285 g for the 2 1/2 cups here, depending on how finely it is sifted. Scooping gives a heavy, tight cake.
- Pan and yield'A shallow greased pan' is not specified, but the volume of batter suits something like a 9x13-inch sheet, an inch or so deep when baked, cut into fifteen or sixteen squares.
Molasses cakes of this kind sit at the point where American gingerbread and everyday cake overlap: the spicing here is nutmeg and cinnamon with no ginger at all, yet the structure -- molasses, soda, boiling water, a shallow pan -- is straight out of the gingerbread tradition. Molasses was the cheap sweetener of the nineteenth-century American kitchen, a byproduct of sugar refining that cost a fraction of granulated sugar, and recipes leaning on it outlasted the strict economic reason for using it. The boiling-water-and-soda method that opens this recipe was a common trick of the era, dissolving the soda so it distributes evenly and reacts with the acid in the molasses on contact rather than in dry pockets.