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Coffee Cake
Mrs. Carson.
One cup of molasses, one cup of brown sugar, one cold coffee, four cups sifted flour, half cup of butter, small teaspoon of allspice, two teaspoons of Cook's Friend baking powder.
A plain molasses cake of the kind kept in the pantry for tea, given here as a bare ingredient list with no method at all. The gaps are the work.
- "One cold coffee"Read this as one cup of cold brewed coffee, matching the other cup measures around it. Leftover breakfast coffee was the usual source, and it should be strong rather than weak, since it is carrying the only liquid in the batter.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian brand, still sold. Two teaspoons of any modern baking powder to four cups of flour is on the low side; molasses is acidic, which may have contributed something to the lift.
- No eggs, no saltNeither appears in the list. The result is dense and slightly chewy rather than tender. A half teaspoon of salt improves it without altering the character.
- Method the book omitsCream the butter with the brown sugar, beat in the molasses and coffee, then fold in the flour sifted with the allspice and baking powder. The batter should be thick enough to drop from the spoon in a mass, not pour.
- Pan and ovenThis quantity fills a 9x13 pan or two loaf tins. The book gives no temperature or time; 350F works, allowing roughly 35 to 45 minutes for the sheet and longer for loaves, tested with a straw or skewer.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the table molasses of the 1870s and will overwhelm the single teaspoon of allspice.
- Yield and keepingAbout sixteen squares. Molasses cakes of this sort are better on the second day, and wrapped closely they keep a week.
The name misleads modern readers: this is not the streusel-topped breakfast cake sold under that name today, but a cake with coffee in it, one of a large family of nineteenth-century recipes built on leftover liquids that would otherwise be thrown out. Molasses, brown sugar and a spoonful of mixed spice made a cheap keeping cake, and the coffee both stretched the liquid and deepened the colour. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, was among the first Canadian community cookbooks, and it shows the form's habits plainly: most recipes carry a contributor's name, and many give neither an oven temperature nor a baking time, on the assumption that the women exchanging them already knew. The mention of Cook's Friend by brand is the other period marker, a nod to a commercial powder at a time when adulteration of baking powders with alum or chalk was a live complaint.