Spice Cake
1 1/2 cup butter (or substitute) cup sugar 2 cups Northern flour 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1/2 teaspoonful each of nutmeg, cinnamon and salt 3/4 cups water Yolks of 4 eggs or 2 whole eggs 3 tablespoonfuls powdered chocolate 1/2 cup raisins Cream butter and sugar, add yolks of eggs well, beaten. Sift flour, spices, chocolate and baking powder; add raisins to flour. Add alternately the milk and flour and fold in beaten whites of eggs.
The ingredient list has been garbled in printing, and the method calls for things the list does not supply. Read the notes before you start rather than mid-batter.
- The butter and sugar line is broken"1 1/2 cup butter (or substitute) cup sugar" cannot be read literally — a number is missing. For a two-cup-flour spice cake the usual proportions of the period are 1/2 cup butter to 1 to 1 1/2 cups sugar; treat the printed line as unreliable rather than a measurement to follow.
- Water or milkThe list says 3/4 cup water, the method says to add the milk alternately with the flour. Milk is the likelier intention in a cake of this style and will give a softer crumb; either will work, but choose one.
- EggsYolks of 4 eggs or 2 whole eggs is offered, then the method tells you to fold in beaten whites. Only the four-yolk version leaves you whites to beat. If you use 2 whole eggs, simply beat them into the creamed butter and skip the folding step.
- Northern flourFlour was sold regionally by wheat type: "Northern" meant hard spring wheat, stronger than the soft winter-wheat flour common in the South. Modern all-purpose flour sits close enough; bread flour will make the cake tougher than intended.
- Powdered chocolateMost probably an unsweetened cocoa powder, though some period 'powdered' or 'ground' chocolates were sold sweetened; if yours is sweetened, reduce the sugar. Three tablespoons sifted with the flour gives colour and a faint bitterness behind the spices rather than a chocolate cake.
- Flour the raisinsTossing the raisins with the sifted dry ingredients, as directed, keeps them suspended instead of sinking to the bottom. Worth doing even if you otherwise change the mixing order.
- No pan, oven or time is givenThe recipe stops at the mixing. Bake in a greased 8- or 9-inch square pan or two 8-inch layers at 350F. Allow roughly 30 to 35 minutes for layers and 40 to 45 for a single pan, testing with a skewer at the centre.
- YieldTwo cups of flour makes a modest cake: about nine squares, or one filled two-layer cake serving eight.
Bride's cook books were a genre of their own in the early twentieth century — slim collections, often assembled by a church group, a newspaper or a flour and baking-powder company, and given to young women setting up a first kitchen. They assume the reader already knows a good deal that the page does not spell out, which is why so many entries stop at the mixing. The cake itself belongs to the great family of American baking-powder butter cakes that displaced yeast-raised and hand-beaten egg cakes once chemical leaveners became cheap and reliable after the 1860s. The reference to "Northern flour" is the period detail worth noticing: before national brands and standardised blends, cooks bought flour by the wheat-growing region.