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soda put in at last moment. After tea, take all the flour (except one plate for dredging raisins), a small piece butter, and a quart or more of milk, and mix like biscuit; then mix butter and sugar, and at nine o'clock in the evening, if sufficiently light, put one-third of butter and sugar into dough; at twelve add another third, and very early in the morning the remainder; about eleven o'clock, if light enough, begin kneading, and continue for an hour, adding meanwhile all the other ingredients. This will make seven loaves. - Mrs. Woodworth, Springfield.
This is the tail end of a yeast-raised cake — the page picks up mid-recipe, so the ingredient list and quantities for sugar, spice and fruit are missing. What survives is the schedule, which is the interesting part and the part that needs translating.
- An incomplete recipeThe text begins mid-sentence and gives no measured amounts for the butter, sugar or raisins it names. Treat it as a record of method and timing rather than something to follow directly; any modern raised cake recipe will supply the proportions.
- This is bread dough, not batterThis is a dough, not a batter -- Flour, butter and a quart of milk are "mixed like biscuit", then enriched in three stages over the night. The overnight rising and the phrase "if sufficiently light" point to yeast, though the surviving text does not name it. The technique is closer to panettone or stollen than to a creamed butter cake.
- Why the butter and sugar go in by thirdsFat and sugar slow yeast. Adding them gradually, once the dough is already active, keeps fermentation going instead of stalling it. This is the hinge of the recipe and the reason for the odd nine o'clock, midnight and dawn schedule.
- "If sufficiently light"Means risen and puffy, probably close to doubled. A modern room at 68F will run considerably slower than a warm nineteenth-century kitchen, and a cold one may not get there at all.
- Soda at the last momentThe soda is insurance, not the main leavening: it neutralizes acidity built up over the long ferment and gives a final lift. Once it is worked in, the dough should go straight to the pans. Nineteenth-century books often call this saleratus, though saleratus was originally potassium bicarbonate rather than the sodium bicarbonate sold as soda today.
- An hour of kneadingThe recipe asks for an hour of hand-kneading while the remaining ingredients go in; gluten development was judged by feel. A stand mixer reaches the same windowpane stage in a fraction of that time; kneading to the dough's condition rather than the clock is the point.
- "A plate for dredging raisins"An informal measure: flour set aside to coat the fruit so it does not sink or clump. Not a precise quantity.
- YieldSeven loaves, from a quart or more of milk and a correspondingly large quantity of flour. Scaling to one or two loaves is sensible.
Raised cakes like this one belong to the long transition between yeast and chemical leavening. Before reliable baking powder was in every pantry, a sweet, fruited, spiced "cake" was often simply an enriched bread dough, built up overnight in stages the way this one is. The touch of soda at the end is a hint of the newer chemistry arriving alongside the older method — it sweetens a dough that has grown faintly sour over a long night's fermentation. The attribution to Mrs. Woodworth of Springfield is characteristic of the compiled cookbooks of the period, which were assembled largely from contributed household receipts and printed the contributor's name and town, so that such a book reads as a record of what particular women actually baked rather than a single author's system.