Marble Cake
White Part-1 1/2 cups sugar, 1/2 cup butter, 1/2 cup sweet milk, whites of 4 eggs, 3 cups of flour, 3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder.
Dark Part-1 cup brown sugar, 1/2 cup molasses, 1/2 cup butter, 1/2 cup sweet milk, yolks of 4 eggs, 2½ cups flour, 3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder, ½ teaspoon each of cloves, allspice, nutmeg and cinnamon.
Mix the white part and the dark part separately. Then mold them together easily so as to get the marbled appearance and bake in a moderately hot oven.
A two-batter marble cake from a baking powder company's promotional booklet, printed with several garbled fractions. Read the quantities with suspicion before you start.
- The broken measurements"1/2 cups sugar" in the white part is almost certainly 1½ cups, and "1½ cup sweet milk" against 3 cups of flour looks like far too much liquid for a creamed butter cake; something nearer ¾ cup is the likelier reading. The dark part's "1½ cup molasses" is likewise suspect next to only ½ cup milk, and ½ cup molasses would make better sense of the batter. These are guesses at the printer's error, not corrections from the source.
- Trailing textThe final line, "3 cups pastry flour 3," is a fragment carried over in printing and belongs to no step. Ignore it.
- Moderately hot ovenAround 375F. For a cake this size, 350F is safer — the outside will set before the centre rises at the higher temperature.
- Calumet Baking PowderCalumet was an alum-phosphate double-acting powder, so modern double-acting baking powder substitutes measure for measure. Three level teaspoons to 3 cups of flour works out at about a teaspoon per cup, which is in line with current practice.
- Sweet milkPlain whole milk. The term distinguished it from sour milk or buttermilk, which required saleratus rather than baking powder.
- Pan and volumeThe two batters together run to well over five cups of flour — this is a very large cake. Use a 10-inch tube pan or divide between two 9x5 loaf pans; a single 9-inch round will overflow.
- Marbling"Mold them together easily" means spoon the two batters into the pan in alternating dollops and draw a knife through two or three times only. More stirring than that and you get a uniform brown cake.
- DonenessExpect 45 to 60 minutes in loaf pans, longer in a tube pan. The molasses batter browns early and darkens deceptively, so test the centre with a skewer rather than judging by colour.
Reliable Recipes was a Calumet Baking Powder booklet, one of hundreds of branded cookbooks that American chemical and milling companies distributed free in the early twentieth century to teach housewives to bake with their particular product — hence the brand name written into every ingredient list. Marble cake itself goes back well into the nineteenth century, when versions built the contrast from molasses and "sweet spices" against a white batter, which is exactly the scheme here, and the split of whites into the light half and yolks into the dark half is the thrifty logic of a cook who refuses to waste either. The uniform two-batter method — same butter, different sugar and spice — is often traced to German Marmorkuchen, though American cookbooks had settled on the molasses-and-spice pairing well before this booklet appeared.