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Ginger Cake
Mrs. Howe.
Three eggs, three-quarters of a cup of sugar, one cup of molasses, one cup of milk, three-quarters of a cup of butter, one teaspoon of soda, one teaspoon of cream of tartar, one tablespoonful of ginger, one of cinnamon, allspice, three cups of flour.
Mrs. Howe gives a bare ingredient list, as was normal in 1876 — the method was assumed. Here is what a modern cook needs to fill in.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add molasses and milk alternately with the flour and spices. Sift the cream of tartar into the flour and dissolve the soda in a spoonful of the milk, added last, then get it into the pan and the oven at once.
- Soda plus cream of tartarOne teaspoon of soda with one teaspoon of cream of tartar is a homemade single-acting baking powder, and it is under-acidified for this batter — the molasses supplies the rest of the acid. It begins working the moment it is wet, so there is no resting the batter.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the table molasses of the period. Sorghum syrup can stand in, though it is not the same thing.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction; 350F suits a cake of this kind. Molasses and sugar together brown fast, so check the edges early rather than trusting a timer.
- Pan and timeThe batter fills a 9x13 pan or two 8-inch rounds. Figure 30-35 minutes in the sheet pan, 25-30 in rounds, until a skewer comes out clean and the centre springs back.
- SpicesA full tablespoon of ginger and one of cinnamon is a lot by modern habit but correct for the style; the allspice measure is ambiguous, and the list may well intend a tablespoon of that too — or scale it back to a teaspoon if you want the ginger forward.
- Butter and saltThree-quarters of a cup is a stick and a half, 170g. The recipe calls for no salt, as many of its period do, and butter was commonly sold salted; with unsalted butter add half a teaspoon.
- YieldAbout 12 to 16 squares. It keeps better than most cakes — the molasses holds moisture, and the flavour is rounder on the second day.
Ginger cake of this sort sits between English gingerbread and the softer American molasses cakes that spread through the nineteenth century as cheap West Indian molasses became a pantry staple in northern kitchens. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing is often taken as a rough sign of age, though the two continued to be combined in the bowl for decades after commercial baking powder became available in the 1860s. The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1874) was compiled from contributions by named local women, and its terseness is characteristic of that community-cookbook form, where the writer assumed her reader already knew how to cream butter and judge an oven by hand.