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Soft Ginger Cake
Mrs. W. A. Carson.
Two eggs, one and one-half cups of molasses, three tablespoons of butter, one teacup of milk, one teaspoon of soda and two of cream of tartar.
This is a contributor's shorthand, typical of subscription cookbooks: the wet ingredients and leavening are given, and the flour, ginger and baking directions are left to the cook's judgment. Read it as a formula to be completed rather than a set of instructions.
- Flour and ginger are missingThe printed recipe names neither, though the title promises ginger. A batter with 1½ cups molasses and a cup of milk generally carries about 3 to 3½ cups of flour and 1 to 2 teaspoons of ground ginger, often with a little cinnamon and cloves. Those figures are a reasonable reconstruction, not something the original states.
- Teacup measureA teacup in period household writing is often reckoned at roughly ¾ cup or 6 fl oz, though the term was never standardised and usage varied from book to book. Whether the "cups" of molasses in the same line were meant as a larger kitchen cup of about 8 fl oz is an inference, not something the recipe states.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis pair is homemade baking powder, from the years before commercial powders were widely trusted or cheap. One teaspoon soda with two of cream of tartar is roughly equivalent to 3 to 4 teaspoons of modern baking powder. Because molasses is itself acidic, the soda will also react with it, so mix and get the cake into the oven promptly.
- Molasses, not blackstrapPeriod molasses was closer to today's dark cooking or fancy molasses. Blackstrap is markedly more bitter and will dominate the ginger; sulphured molasses tastes harsh in a plain cake like this.
- OvenThe original gives no oven, pan or timing. If you bake the reconstruction above, a moderate oven of about 350F suits it: a greased 9x13 pan for roughly 30 to 35 minutes, or two 8-inch square pans for 25 to 30, until the centre springs back.
- Butter quantityThree tablespoons is lean by modern standards, which is why this is a soft, slightly chewy gingerbread rather than a rich cake. Melt and cool the butter slightly before beating it into the molasses and eggs.
- Yield and servingAbout 12 to 16 squares. It is meant to be cut warm from the pan and eaten plain, with butter, or with whipped cream or applesauce.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada," with proceeds going to the Hospital for Sick Children, and it is generally credited as the first Canadian fundraising community cookbook — hence the attribution to Mrs. W. A. Carson rather than to an author. Nineteenth-century books normally distinguish soft gingerbread, a cake baked in a pan and cut into squares, from the hard, rolled and cut gingerbread that keeps for weeks; this is firmly the former. Molasses was the cheap sweetener of the period, arriving in barrels from the West Indies trade, and a molasses-and-soda cake could be assembled from pantry staples without the expense of white sugar or the labour of creaming it. The reliance on soda plus cream of tartar rather than a tin of baking powder places the recipe in the transitional decades when cooks still mixed their own leavening at the kitchen table.