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Sour-Milk Cake
1 egg 1 level teaspoon soda 1/2 cup chopped raisins Spices to taste Mix all well together. Bake in a loaf with two radiators.
This is a fireless-cooker recipe, written for a piece of equipment almost no one owns and printed in a loose-leaf book where the fundamentals were assumed from the pages around it. As given, the ingredient list is incomplete.
- Missing ingredientsA sour-milk cake needs sour milk, flour, sugar and a fat, none of which appear here. The quantities cannot be reconstructed from this page alone; treat it as a variation note rather than a standalone formula.
- What a radiator isIn a fireless cooker, the "radiators" are soapstone or cast-iron disks heated on the stove until very hot, then dropped into the insulated well above and below the food. Two radiators means one under the pan and one over it, which is how the box managed to bake rather than merely steam.
- Oven equivalentTwo radiators in a well-packed fireless cooker gave a falling heat, high at the start and dropping steadily; no fixed starting temperature can be given. A conventional moderate oven at 350F is the nearest modern stand-in for a loaf like this.
- Sour milkThe sour milk of the period was raw milk left to clabber, mildly acidic and slightly thickened. Cultured buttermilk is the closest current equivalent; sweet milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup will also react with the soda.
- Soda and acidOne level teaspoon of soda is calibrated to the acid in the milk, not to the flour. Without the sour milk the soda has nothing to work against and will leave a soapy, yellowish crumb.
- "Spices to taste"For a raisin loaf of this type, cinnamon with a little clove and nutmeg is a common choice; roughly a teaspoon of cinnamon to a quarter teaspoon each of the others per loaf.
- RaisinsChopping the raisins, as directed, keeps them suspended instead of settling. Tossing them in a spoonful of the flour helps further in a batter this loose.
- Timing and yieldA fireless cooker loaf cooked on stored heat, with no opportunity to check partway; an hour to an hour and a half would be usual for a loaf. With the quantities missing, neither the time nor the yield can be fixed from this page.
The fireless cooker was a brief but genuine craze in American kitchens between roughly 1905 and the 1920s: an insulated wooden or metal box, packed with hay, asbestos or mineral wool, in which food cooked on heat stored in preheated stone or iron disks. It saved fuel, kept the kitchen cool in summer, and let a woman leave the house with dinner underway. Baking in such a box was the hardest trick to pull off, which is why the instruction here is not a temperature or a time but a count of radiators. Sour-milk cakes belong to the same economy of means: before refrigeration, milk on the turn was a daily fact, and the soda-and-sour-milk leavening that used it up was one of the workhorses of nineteenth-century American home baking.