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Spice Cake (II)
Ada King.
One cup of sugar, three-fourths cup of butter, fill up with milk, one egg, one and three-fourths cups of flour, one small teaspoon soda, one dessert spoon of cinnamon, cloves, and allspice.
A terse ingredient list of the kind contributed by the hundreds to community cookbooks, written for a cook who already knew what cake batter should look like. Two things need settling before you start: how much milk, and how much spice.
- "Fill up with milk"This almost certainly means to add milk to the butter cup until it is full — about 1/4 cup — since the butter measure is three-fourths of a cup. Read that way the batter is very stiff, closer to a thick spice loaf than a layer cake; if it will not drop from the spoon, a little more milk is within the spirit of the recipe.
- The spice quantity is ambiguous"One dessert spoon of cinnamon, cloves, and allspice" can be read as a dessertspoon of each or a dessertspoon in total. A dessertspoon is 2 teaspoons, so the first reading gives 2 tablespoons of spice in under two cups of flour, which is aggressive but not impossible for a cake of this period. Start with 2 teaspoons cinnamon and 1 teaspoon each of cloves and allspice.
- Soda needs an acidA teaspoon of soda with sweet milk will leave a soapy, faintly bitter note and little lift. Some period recipes took plain "milk" to mean sour milk or buttermilk, though many distinguished "sweet" from "sour" explicitly and this one does neither; use buttermilk, or add a teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar to fresh milk and let it stand.
- OvenNo temperature is given; few domestic stoves of the period carried a thermometer and none a thermostat, so the cook judged the heat herself. A modern equivalent is about 350F.
- Pan and timeThe batter suits one 8-inch round or a small loaf pan, buttered and floured. Figure 30-35 minutes for the round, 45-55 for a loaf, testing with a straw or skewer at the centre.
- Mixing orderCream the butter and sugar, beat in the egg, sift the soda and spices with the flour, then alternate flour and milk. Working the soda through the flour rather than dumping it into the liquid avoids the orange-brown streaks that plague soda cakes.
- YieldAbout eight modest slices. It is a plain everyday cake meant to be eaten unfrosted, and it improves on the second day once the spice settles.
Spice cakes like this one sit at the point where a household's spice cupboard met its egg supply: one egg, no cocoa, no nuts, and a great deal of cinnamon, cloves and allspice — spices that had become relatively cheap imports in North American groceries by the later nineteenth century, while eggs and butter still cost real money. Community cookbooks assembled from contributions by named local women, here Ada King, routinely printed several near-identical cakes under the same title, which is why this one is numbered as a second "Spice Cake". The shorthand tells you as much as the ingredients do: "fill up with milk" assumes the reader knows the cup in question, and the missing oven temperature assumes she has learned her own stove by hand.