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Ginger Spice Cake
Mrs. J. D. Odell. 303 One cup of molasses, half a cup of butter, half a cup of milk, two eggs, one teaspoon of cloves, one teaspoon of cinnamon, one teaspoon of Cook's Friend baking powder, salt; bake in a quick oven.
A terse molasses cake in the shorthand of the 1870s, written for a cook who already knew what a gingerbread batter should look like. Two things are missing from the printed text, and one of them is the flour.
- No flour is listedThe recipe as printed omits the flour entirely, which is a printing or transcription gap rather than an instruction. A batter on this scale — one cup molasses, half a cup each butter and milk, two eggs — normally took about 2 1/2 to 3 cups of flour in period cookbooks. Any figure is a reconstruction, so treat it as one and judge by the batter, which should drop thickly from the spoon.
- No ginger eitherDespite the title, ginger appears nowhere in the ingredient list. One to two teaspoons of ground ginger alongside the cloves and cinnamon brings it in line with the name and with comparable molasses cakes of the period.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian baking-powder brand on the market when this book was compiled in Toronto; substitute the same measure of modern baking powder. One teaspoon is light for this quantity of batter, and molasses cakes of the era were often raised with saleratus (baking soda) instead, which reacts with the acid in the molasses.
- "A quick oven"Usually rendered as roughly 400–425F. That is hotter than a molasses batter wants, which scorches early because of its sugar content — the term reflects wood-fired ovens where the cook moved the pan and the heat fell steadily through the bake. Bake at 350F and check from 30 minutes.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and much darker than the table molasses of the 1870s. Warming it slightly makes it easier to beat into the creamed butter.
- Salt"Salt" without quantity means about half a teaspoon here, assuming unsalted butter.
- Pan and yieldEnough for one 8-inch square pan or a small loaf; about 9 servings. Molasses cakes of this type keep better than plain cakes and improve on the second day as the spices settle.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, which makes it one of the earliest Canadian community cookbooks. Recipes like this one arrived as they were written in a household notebook — named for their contributor, assuming a cook who knew the proportions, and sometimes losing an ingredient between the kitchen table and the printer. Molasses cake belongs to the same family as gingerbread and was a staple of North American baking through the nineteenth century because molasses was cheaper than refined sugar and, being acidic, worked with saleratus to raise a batter before reliable baking powders were on every grocer's shelf. Cook's Friend was among the branded chemical leaveners competing for Canadian kitchens in this period, and the contributor's willingness to name it in print is a small piece of advertising history embedded in a charity cookbook.