Coffee Cake
Two cups brown sugar, one of butter, one of molasses, one of strong coffee as prepared for the table, four eggs, one teaspoon saleratus, two of cinnamon, two of cloves, one of grated nutmeg, pound raisins, one of currants, four cups of flour.
This is a dark spiced fruit cake leavened with soda and molasses, not the streusel-topped breakfast cake the name suggests today. The original gives no pan, no oven and no time, so those are the gaps to fill.
- SaleratusAn early chemical leavener (potassium, later sodium, bicarbonate); use baking soda in its place. One teaspoon suits this batter: the molasses and brown sugar supply acid for it to react with.
- Coffee "as prepared for the table"One cup of brewed coffee, strong but drinkable, at room temperature. Not espresso, not grounds, and not instant powder undiluted.
- The fruit measures"Pound raisins, one of currants" most likely means a pound of each by weight, though the elliptical wording could also be read as a cup of currants. A pound of each is roughly 3 cups of raisins and 3 cups of currants against four cups of flour, so the batter is barely more than mortar for the fruit.
- Keeping the fruit suspendedToss the raisins and currants with a few spoonfuls of the measured flour before folding them in. Otherwise a batter this loose lets them sink to the bottom in the first twenty minutes.
- OvenA cake this heavy wants a slow oven, 300-325F. Anything hotter sets the crust while the centre is still raw, and the molasses scorches.
- Pan and timeThe quantity fills two 9x5 loaf pans or one large tube pan, lined with parchment. Expect 1 1/4 to 1 3/4 hours; test with a skewer in the centre and tent with foil once the top has coloured.
- ButterOne cup is 8 oz, and it should be soft enough to cream with the brown sugar until light before the eggs go in one at a time. Melted butter gives a greasy, dense crumb here.
- Yield and keepingAbout five pounds of finished cake, 24 or more servings. Like most spiced fruit cakes it improves after two or three days wrapped tightly, and will keep a week or more in a cool place.
In nineteenth-century American cookbooks "coffee cake" often meant this: a cake with coffee in it, generally a dark, heavily spiced, fruited loaf of the same family as election cake and hermit cookies. The German Kaffeekuchen sense, a yeasted or crumb-topped cake eaten with coffee, spread widely in the United States later and eventually took the name over entirely. The recipe's economy is its own kind of evidence: brown sugar and molasses instead of white sugar, leftover breakfast coffee instead of milk, soda instead of baking powder, and a heroic quantity of dried fruit to carry the sweetness.