Spice Cake
1 cup sugar 1/2 cup lard little salt 1 cup raisins chopped 1 tsp. soda 1 tsp. Slade's cinnamon. 1/2 tsp. Slade's nutmeg 1 cup sour or sweet milk 1/2 tsp. Slade's cloves 3 cups flour If sweet milk is used add 1 tablespoon molasses. Bake in a moderate oven 1 hour.
— Mrs. W. H. Cole
A plain eggless spice loaf of the sort kept in every early-twentieth-century cake box. The recipe assumes you know the method, so the hinge is entirely in the leavening: the soda needs the acid in sour milk, and the molasses is there to supply it when you use sweet milk instead.
- Sour milk means clabbered milkNot modern soured cream or yogurt thinned down, though buttermilk is the closest ready substitute and works exactly as intended. If you use fresh (sweet) milk, do not skip the tablespoon of molasses — it is the only acid in the batter, and even then the crumb will rise less and may carry a faint soda taste.
- Slade's spicesD. & L. Slade Co. of Boston was a spice packer; the brand name simply reflects a local advertiser or the contributor's pantry. Any ground cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves will do, though buy them recently — the quantities here are small and stale spice gives nothing.
- LardHalf a cup of lard makes a tender, slightly savory crumb. Modern shortening or softened unsalted butter substitutes cup for cup; butter will brown the crust faster and add flavor the original did not have.
- Moderate ovenRead as roughly 350F. An hour suits a single loaf pan; check at 45 minutes with a skewer.
- No pan givenThe volume suits one 9x5-inch loaf pan, or an 8-inch square. Grease and flour it, or line with parchment — this batter is stiff and clings.
- Method, since none is statedCream the lard and sugar, beat in the milk (and molasses), then add the flour sifted with the soda, salt and spices. Toss the chopped raisins in a spoonful of the flour first so they do not sink.
- "Little salt"Read as a scant 1/2 teaspoon. Lard and shortening are unsalted; if using salted butter, cut it back.
- Yield and keepingOne loaf, about 10 slices. Eggless spice cakes of this kind stay moist for several days wrapped tightly.
Eggless, butterless spice cakes leavened with soda and sour milk were common in community cookbooks of this kind -- cheap, forgiving, and made from what stood in the pantry rather than what had to be bought. Sour milk was not a hardship ingredient but a daily fact of unpasteurized dairy: milk that had clabbered on its own was too good to waste, and its acid made soda usable before commercial baking powder was universal. The instruction to add molasses with sweet milk suggests the cook knew the soda needed an acid to work against. The named brand, Slade's, points to Boston-area distribution; whether the mention was solicited by advertisers or simply habitual is impossible to tell from the page. The attribution to Mrs. W. H. Cole is typical of the genre, where a recipe carried its donor's name.