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Directions for Making Spice Cakes
When whole eggs are used, mix as for pound cake; when yolks only, mix as yellow cakes; add spices to batter and then fruit if used. 1 cup butter. 2 cups sugar. 1/2 cup sour milk. 3 eggs. 1 teaspoon soda. 1 cup blackberry jam. 1 teaspoon cinnamon. 1/4 teaspoon allspice. 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg.
Bake in two layers. Ice with seafoam icing.--Mrs. Cheatham.
This is a blackberry jam cake in the Southern manner, written as shorthand for cooks who already knew the method. Two things need saying before anything else: there is no flour in the ingredient list, and the mixing directions point you to other recipes in the book.
- The flour is missingAs printed, the list gives fat, sugar, liquid, eggs, leavening, jam and spice but no flour at all. A butter cake on 1 cup butter and 2 cups sugar wants roughly 3 cups of soft or all-purpose flour; the jam adds moisture, so start at 3 cups and judge the batter, which should mound thickly on the spoon rather than pour.
- "Mix as for pound cake"With whole eggs, cream the butter and sugar until pale and light, beat the eggs in one at a time, then alternate the flour and sour milk. For the yolks-only version the recipe sends you instead to the book's yellow-cake method, which would use yolks alone; the whites are either folded in at the end or omitted.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here is naturally soured milk; buttermilk is the usual modern substitute. The teaspoon of soda both neutralizes the acid and is the recipe's only chemical leavening (the creaming and the eggs do the rest), so get the batter into the pans promptly once the two meet.
- Blackberry jamA full cup of jam, in this period most likely homemade and seedy. Homemade preserves of the kind varied in stiffness and sweetness, and a commercial jam may well be looser; if yours is very runny, reduce the sour milk slightly, and seedless is a fair substitute.
- Pans and ovenThe recipe specifies only two layers; no pan size or oven heat is given. Two 8- or 9-inch round pans, buttered and floured, at 350F for 25 to 35 minutes, until the center springs back, suits a batter of this size. The jam and sugar make the edges color early, so judge by the middle.
- Seafoam icingSeafoam is generally a boiled brown-sugar meringue frosting: brown sugar syrup taken to the soft-ball stage, around 238F, beaten into stiffly whipped egg whites until it holds a peak. It sets to a matte shell and is spread while still warm and workable.
- YieldA two-layer cake serving 10 to 12. It keeps better than a plain butter cake, three or four days under a cover, as the jam holds moisture.
Jam cake is associated with the Upper South, particularly Kentucky and Tennessee, where blackberry preserves put up in summer went into cakes baked for Christmas. The formula is a pound-cake framework loosened with soured milk and soda, spiced with cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg, and darkened by the fruit. The terse cross-referenced style, telling you only what differs from pound cake or yellow cake, suggests a readership assumed to know the base methods, and "Mrs. Cheatham" reads as a named contributor of the sort common in community and subscription collections. Seafoam icing, a brown-sugar boiled meringue, is a frequent partner for jam cake in collections of the period.