Ribbon Cake
1/2 cup butter. 2 cups sugar. Yolks 4 eggs. 1 cup milk. 3 1/2 cups flour. 5 teaspoons baking powder Whites 4 eggs ½ teaspoon cinnamon ¼ teaspoon mace 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg 1/3 cup raisins, seeded and cut in pieces 1/3 cup figs, finely chopped 1 tablespoon molasses Mix first seven ingredients in order given. Bake twothirds of the mixture in two layer-cake pans. To the remainder add spices, fruit, and molasses, and bake in a layer-cake pan. Put layers together with jelly (apple usually being preferred, as it has less flavor), having the dark layer in the centre.
The text as printed is a fragment: it begins mid-list with the baking powder, so the butter, sugar, flour, and milk that make up the "first seven ingredients" are missing. Treat this as assembly instructions for a plain butter cake rather than a complete formula.
- The missing baseThe fragment gives no way to recover the butter, sugar, flour, and milk quantities; the 5 teaspoons of baking powder suggest a batter rather larger than 2 cups of flour. Any reliable white or plain layer-cake batter, creamed and lightened with the beaten whites, will carry the spices, fruit, and molasses given here.
- SpicesThe printed page gives a quarter teaspoon of mace and half a teaspoon of cinnamon, as our text now reads. Both go only into the one-third of the batter that becomes the dark centre layer, so the spicing is stronger than the amounts suggest.
- Baking powderFive teaspoons is far more than a modern baker would use. With modern double-acting powder, about 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoons per cup of flour is plenty; too much can leave a soapy aftertaste and a coarse crumb.
- Mixing order"Mix first seven ingredients in order given" means cream the fat and sugar, add liquid and sifted dry ingredients alternately, and fold in the stiffly beaten whites last. Beat the spiced third only enough to distribute the molasses and fruit.
- Flour the fruitToss the cut raisins and chopped figs in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in, or they sink to the bottom of the dark layer.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. 350F suits layers of this size, 20 to 25 minutes; the dark layer, heavier with fruit and molasses, may want a few minutes more.
- PansThree layer-cake pans, greased and floured or lined with parchment. Two-thirds of the batter split between two pans and the remaining third in a third pan gives three layers of much the same thickness.
- The fillingApple jelly is the usual preference, the recipe says, because it has less flavor, letting the spiced layer read clearly. Spread it thinly and only after the layers are fully cool, or it soaks in and the cake slides.
- YieldOne three-layer cake, 10 to 12 slices. Cut it in wedges so each shows the dark band through the middle.
Ribbon cake belongs to the late nineteenth-century American fashion for layer cakes, which spread quickly once chemical leavening and cheap stamped tinware made thin, evenly baked rounds easy to produce at home. The trick is economy of effort rather than of ingredients: one batter is mixed, most of it baked plain, and the remainder turned dark with molasses, spice, and dried fruit so that a single bowl yields a cake that looks striped when cut. Variants in period books are said to vary the number of layers and sometimes to tint one portion, and they appear under names like ribbon or rainbow cake. Its presence in the Boston Cooking-School collection is characteristic of the book's method, which teaches a handful of base batters and then shows how far they can be varied; the note preferring apple jelly "as it has less flavor" is exactly the sort of practical reasoning that made the volume a standard.