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Ribbon Cake
Two and a half cups sugar, one of butter, one of sweet milk, tea-spoon cream tartar, half tea-spoon soda, four cups flour, four eggs; reserve a third of this mixture, and bake the rest in two loaves of the same size. Add to third reserved, one cup raisins, fourth pound citron, a cup of currants, two table-spoons molasses, tea-spoon each of all kinds of spice; bake in a tin the same size as other loaves; put the three loaves together with a little icing or currant jelly, placing the fruit loaf in the middle; frost the top and sides.-Miss Alice Trimble, Mt. Gilead.
A three-layer cake built from one batter, two-thirds plain and one-third turned into dark fruitcake. The original assumes you know how to cream butter and sugar and how to judge a moderate oven; everything else is here.
- The hinge: bake all three layers the same sizeThe whole point of the cake is three flat slabs of equal footprint, stacked with the dark one in the middle so a cut slice shows a stripe. Use three matching 8- or 9-inch round or square pans, and divide the plain batter evenly by weight rather than by eye.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction; bake at about 350F. The "loaves" here are probably shallow layers rather than loaves in the modern sense, so start checking at 25 minutes; the fruit layer is heavier and wetter and will likely want 5 to 10 minutes longer.
- Cream of tartar and sodaOne teaspoon cream of tartar with half a teaspoon soda is a period substitute for baking powder, roughly equivalent to two teaspoons of modern double-acting powder. If you use powder instead, drop both and leave the milk as it is.
- "Sweet milk"Plain whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk called for in soda-raised recipes.
- Method the recipe leaves outCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the milk and the flour with the leavening alternately. Portion off the third for the fruit layer before you add anything spiced, and toss the raisins, currants and citron in a little of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold at holiday time and in Middle Eastern groceries; a quarter pound is about 3/4 cup chopped. Candied orange or lemon peel is the closest substitute.
- "Teaspoon each of all kinds of spice"Usually taken to mean the common baking spices: cinnamon, cloves, mace or nutmeg, and allspice. A teaspoon of each in a third of this batter is assertive but in keeping; scale back the cloves if you want the fruit to read.
- AssemblyCurrant jelly is the better choice of the two given, since a thin layer of icing between warm layers will slide. Cool all three completely, and frost the sides as well as the top, as the recipe directs.
- YieldAbout 16 to 20 servings. It keeps several days under a cover, and the fruit layer improves for the first two.
Ribbon cake was a common feature of American community cookbooks from roughly the 1870s through the 1910s, and its appeal was economy of effort: one batter, one creaming, one afternoon, and a cake that looked like two. The dark middle layer is a small fruitcake, so the finished thing sits between an everyday layer cake and the heavily fruited cakes reserved for Christmas and weddings. Variants abound in books of the period, some using three colors rather than two, some tinting a layer pink with cochineal. The attribution to Miss Alice Trimble of Mt. Gilead is typical of how such compilations were assembled, by soliciting recipes from named contributors.