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Cream Spice Cake
1 cup sour cream 1 cup sugar 1 egg, well beaten 1 teaspoonful soda 1 cup raisins, chopped and floured Sprinkling of salt (if needed) 2 cups bread flour teaspoonful vanilla 2 teaspoonfuls grated nutmeg 2 teaspoonfuls cinnamon 1 teaspoonful allspice teaspoonful clove Mix all together, adding to sour cream the soda dissolved in a little hot water. Bake as a loaf for one hour, or in muffin-tins. A small amount of sour cream may always be set aside, and more added each day as it is left, until there is a cupful. When each addition is made, stir well, putting in a little salt, and it will keep some time,
A one-bowl sour-cream spice loaf that leans entirely on soda and the acid in the cream for lift. Two things need attention before you start: the missing fractions in the spice list, and the fact that modern sour cream is not the same product the author had.
- The cream is the leaveningThere is no baking powder here. The soda reacts with the lactic acid in the soured cream, so use full-fat cultured sour cream (about 1 cup, 240 g) and get the batter into the tin as soon as the soda goes in. Dissolve the soda in a tablespoon of hot water, as directed, so it disperses rather than leaving bitter specks.
- Do not sour your own creamThe book's closing advice — set aside leftover cream, add more each day, salt it, and it will keep — belonged to a world of raw, naturally clabbering dairy. Pasteurized cream left out does not sour cleanly; it spoils. Buy cultured sour cream or use full-fat plain yogurt or buttermilk-thinned crème fraîche instead.
- Missing fractionsThe transcription has dropped numerals before "teaspoonful vanilla" and "teaspoonful clove"; both were most likely fractions (a half or a quarter) rather than whole spoonfuls. Treat them as ½ teaspoon at most. Clove at a full teaspoon would dominate everything else in the tin.
- Two teaspoons of nutmeg is deliberateTwo teaspoons of nutmeg -- That is a heavy hand by current standards, though large spice quantities are not unusual in cakes of this period. The recipe's "grated nutmeg" points to freshly grated; if using pre-ground, one teaspoon is closer to the intended effect.
- OvenNo temperature is given; the recipe leaves the heat to the cook's judgement and specifies only one hour. Bake the loaf at 350°F (175°C) for about an hour, testing at 50 minutes; muffin tins want 350°F for 18–22 minutes.
- Bread flourIn books of this period "bread flour" meant ordinary strong wheat flour as opposed to soft pastry flour. Modern all-purpose gives a more tender crumb here; high-protein bread flour will make the loaf chewy.
- Flouring the raisinsTossing the chopped raisins in a spoonful of the measured flour keeps them suspended rather than sinking to the bottom. Take that flour from the two cups, not in addition to it.
- YieldOne 8½ x 4½-inch loaf, or roughly 12 muffins. It keeps well wrapped for three or four days and improves on the second day as the spices settle.
This appears in a chapter on left-over bread not because the cake uses bread, but because books of this kind organised themselves around thrift rather than around the finished dish — the salvaged ingredient here is the tag-end of sour cream, hoarded a spoonful at a time until there was enough to bake with. That practice made sense in a household taking raw milk that soured predictably into clabber. Sour-cream spice cakes were a staple of the genre: cheap, keeping well, and heavily spiced. The cook-book-of-left-overs format itself flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century, when domestic-science writers were pressing the argument that waste in the kitchen was a moral as well as an economic failing.