Molasses Cake
One cup butter, one of brown sugar, one-half of molasses, one of milk, one and one-half pints flour, one and one-half teaspoonfuls baking powder, one egg.
Rub smooth the butter and sugar; add the milk, egg and molasses; stir in flour, sifted with the powder; mix into a consistent batter, and bake in cake in tin forty minutes.
A plain one-egg molasses cake with an unusually generous amount of butter and no stated oven temperature. Two things need settling before you start: how much flour a pint is, and how hot the oven should be.
- Flour by the pintOne and one-half pints is 3 cups by dry measure, roughly 13 to 14 oz of all-purpose flour. Spoon it into the cup and level rather than scooping, or the batter will be stiff and the crumb dry.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none. A butter-and-molasses cake of this size belongs in a moderate oven, 350F. Molasses browns fast, so check at 35 minutes and tent with foil if the top is darkening before the centre is set.
- The pan"in cake in tin" most likely means a single tin rather than layers. A 9-inch square or a 9-by-13 pan both work; the square will need the full 40 minutes or a little more, the larger pan closer to 30.
- Butter and sugarA full cup of butter to one cup of brown sugar is rich by modern cake standards. Have the butter properly softened, since "rub smooth" means creamed, not melted, and melted butter will give a greasy, dense cake.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the table molasses of the period. Half a cup is intended.
- LeaveningBaking powder alone is what the recipe calls for, though period recipes using molasses often paired it with soda. The leavening here is on the modest side for 3 cups of flour, which may account for a tight crumb.
- MixingAdd the flour last and stop as soon as it disappears. "A consistent batter" means uniform, not beaten smooth; overworking after the flour goes in toughens it.
- Doneness and yieldA skewer in the centre should come out clean and the cake should pull slightly from the sides. It cuts into 12 to 16 squares and keeps better than most plain cakes, the molasses holding moisture for several days in a tin.
Molasses was the everyday sweetener of American kitchens well into the nineteenth century, cheaper than refined sugar and shipped north in quantity from the Caribbean; cakes, cookies and gingerbreads built on it were household staples rather than special occasion baking. This one is notably restrained, with no ginger, cinnamon or cloves, which leaves the molasses itself as the whole flavour. Its appearance in a bride's cook book is typical of the genre: such volumes gathered simple, forgiving, inexpensive recipes for a cook assumed to be setting up her first kitchen, which is why the instructions are so brief and the oven temperature is left to judgment. Ranges of the period had no thermostats, and "bake forty minutes" was as precise as a writer could usefully be.