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— Mrs. Minnick's Soft Honey-Cake
Put scant teaspoonful soda in teacup, pour 5 tablespoonfuls hot water on the soda; then fill the cup with extracted honey. Take 1/2 cup of butter and 1 egg and beat together; add 2 cups of flour and 1 teaspoonful of ginger; stir all together, and bake in a very slow oven.
A short, plain honey cake of the community-cookbook type, written for a cook who already knows what a cake batter should look like. Two things need translating: the teacup, and "very slow oven."
- The teacupA period teacup is usually reckoned smaller than the modern 8 oz measuring cup, commonly around 6 fl oz, though the term was not standardised. Soda plus 5 tablespoons hot water plus honey to fill comes to something under 1/2 cup of honey; measure the honey into the same cup and you will be close enough.
- Very slow ovenRoughly 250-275F. Honey browns faster than sugar, its fructose being the more reactive, so the low heat is deliberate rather than a misprint. The recipe gives no time or pan; reckon on something like 35-45 minutes in an 8-inch square or a small loaf pan.
- Extracted honeySimply honey spun out of the comb rather than cut comb or strained honey. Any liquid supermarket honey works; a mild clover or orange-blossom honey suits the ginger better than buckwheat.
- The soda and hot waterDissolving the soda first is the hinge. Honey is acidic, and undissolved soda leaves brown-yellow specks and a soapy taste. Pour the hot water on, stir until clear, then add the honey.
- No salt, no leavening beyond the sodaAdd 1/4 teaspoon salt if you want the ginger to read at all. The scant teaspoon of soda is the only lift, so mix just until combined and get it into the oven promptly.
- Batter consistencyWith 2 cups of flour this is a thick, spoonable batter rather than a pourable one. If it is stiff enough to hold a peak, a tablespoon or two of milk brings it back.
- Doneness and yieldThe crumb stays moist and slightly sticky from the honey, so use a skewer with a few dry crumbs rather than a clean skewer as your test. It makes one small cake; the recipe gives no yield.
Honey cakes are among the oldest sweet baking in Europe, predating cheap refined sugar, and they persisted in American home baking wherever a household kept bees or bought from a neighbour who did. The word "extracted" in the ingredient line marks the recipe as post-Civil-War: the centrifugal honey extractor, generally credited to Franz Hruschka, an Austrian army officer who kept bees, in the 1860s, let beekeepers spin liquid honey out of intact combs and sell it by the jar, so that liquid honey became a cheap pantry staple rather than a by-product of destroying comb. The pairing with soda is equally of its period, since honey's acidity gives soda something to react with without needing cream of tartar or sour milk. The attribution to Mrs. Minnick follows a familiar pattern: in subscription and church cookbooks generally, recipes travelled under a contributor's name and were vouched for by her reputation in the neighbourhood rather than by any test kitchen.