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Marble Cake (II)
three 1/2 3/4.
WHITE PART.-Whites of seven eggs, two 3/4. cups of white sugar, one cup of butter, one 1/2 cup of sweet milk, four cups of flour, two teaspoonsful of cream of tartar, one teaspoon of soda. 3.
BROWN PART.-Yolks of seven eggs, two cups of brown sugar, one cup of molasses, one cup of sour milk, one cup of butter, five cups of flour, two tablespoonsful of cloves, one nutmeg, one teaspoon and a-half of soda.
Two separate batters, dropped into the pan in alternating spoonfuls to give the marbled effect. The original assumes you already know how to cream butter and sugar and how hot to run the oven, so the practical detail is all below.
- The hinge: keep the batters distinctSpoon the light and dark batters into the tin alternately, in dollops, then draw a knife or skewer through once or twice at most. Any more stirring and the two merge into a uniform brown cake.
- Scale and pansTogether the two batters use about nine cups of flour and the whites and yolks of seven eggs. This is a very large cake by modern standards; it can be divided between two 10-inch tube pans or three 9x5 loaf tins rather than baked in one.
- OvenThe original gives no oven direction. A moderate oven, around 325-350F, suits it; a cake this deep wants the lower end, roughly 60-75 minutes for a tube pan, tested with a skewer in the centre.
- Sweet milk and sour milk"Sweet" milk is simply fresh whole milk. "Sour" milk was naturally soured raw milk; use buttermilk, which supplies the acid the soda in the brown part needs to work.
- Cream of tartar and sodaThe white part uses the two-part leavening that preceded commercial baking powder. Two teaspoons cream of tartar plus one teaspoon soda is roughly equivalent to about four teaspoons of baking powder, if you would rather use that.
- The clovesTwo tablespoons of ground cloves is a great deal even for a batter this size and will overwhelm everything else. Other period marble cake receipts often call for far less; treat the larger figure with suspicion and season to your own taste.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will fight the spice. Combined with brown sugar it makes the dark batter noticeably softer and quicker to colour than the white.
- Whites and yolksThe recipe is built so that seven eggs serve both batters: whites to the white part, yolks to the brown. Beat the whites to soft peaks and fold them in last for the lighter half.
Marble cake belongs to the second half of the nineteenth century, when chemical leavening and reliably milled white flour made it possible for a home baker to produce two batters of the same texture but different colour. Earlier versions, often traced to German-American baking, coloured the dark half with molasses and spice rather than chocolate; cocoa marble cakes became common only later, as manufactured cocoa grew cheap. The egg economy here is characteristic of the era's household books: nothing is wasted, the whites lightening one batter while the yolks enrich the other, and the two are baked together in a single tin. The Home Cook Book was compiled from contributed receipts, and the instructions stop at a list of ingredients.