Spice Cake
1 cup butter. 1 cup sugar. 3 cups flour. 1 scant cup of molasses. 1 cup buttermilk. 1 teaspoon soda. 2 eggs beaten together. 1 rounding teaspoon cinnamon. 1 scant teaspoon nutmeg.
Mrs. Wilson gives quantities and nothing else, which was normal for a cake this familiar in 1920. The proportions are sound; what follows is the method the list assumes, plus the terms that no longer read clearly.
- The hinge: dissolve the soda in the buttermilkStir the teaspoon of soda into the cup of buttermilk and add it last, alternating with the flour, then get the batter into the pan promptly. The acid in buttermilk and molasses starts working immediately and there is no baking powder as backup.
- Assembly orderCream butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then the molasses; sift the spices with the flour and add flour and buttermilk alternately. Salt is not listed, so use salted butter or add half a teaspoon.
- "Scant" and "rounding"Scant means just under a level measure; rounding means heaped slightly above the rim, perhaps half again as much as a level teaspoon of cinnamon. Both were common shorthand in cookbooks of the period.
- MolassesUse unsulphured mild molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the baking molasses of the period and will dominate the spices.
- Oven and panThe recipe gives no oven; a moderate oven, around 350F, suits it. The batter fills a tube pan or two 8-inch layers; a loaf will need closer to an hour. Molasses cakes brown fast, so judge by a clean tester rather than colour.
- ButtermilkCultured supermarket buttermilk works in place of the churned buttermilk assumed here, though it may be somewhat more acidic.
- YieldAbout twelve to sixteen servings. The crumb is moist and keeps better on the second day, wrapped.
- Filed oddlyThis appears under Vegetables in the book, an artefact of how the collection was assembled rather than any instruction about the cake.
Spice cakes built on molasses, buttermilk and soda were a mainstay of American home baking through the nineteenth century: molasses was cheaper than refined sugar, buttermilk was a by-product of butter-making that households with a churn had to use up, and the pairing of an acid liquid with soda gave lift before commercial baking powder was widespread. Cinnamon and nutmeg were among the spices most commonly kept in an ordinary pantry, and they recur in this combination again and again. Mrs. Wilson wrote for Philadelphia readers just after the First World War, when wartime sugar and butter restrictions had recently loosened; the bare list of quantities, with no method at all, suggests how much she expected her audience to know already.