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Spice Cake (III)
Mrs. J. R. Silliman.
Take one cup of butter, two cups of molasses, four eggs, two tablespoonsful of allspice, two teaspoonsful of Cook's Friend baking powder, one cup of milk, three cons of Lour.
A one-line ingredient list with no method, no pan and no oven — typical of contributor recipes in community cookbooks, where the compiler assumed the reader already knew how to build a butter cake. The proportions are sound; everything else has to be supplied.
- The garbled line"Three cons of Lour" is a typesetting error for three cups of flour. Read with that correction the batter balances: 1 cup butter, 2 cups molasses, 4 eggs, 1 cup milk, 3 cups flour.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian baking-powder brand of the period. Substitute the same volume of modern double-acting baking powder — two teaspoons for three cups of flour is on the low side, and molasses adds acidity, so a half teaspoon of baking soda alongside would not be out of place.
- Molasses, not blackstrapTwo cups is the dominant flavour here. Use ordinary dark cooking molasses; blackstrap is markedly more bitter and will overwhelm the cake.
- Two tablespoons of allspiceNothing suggests a misprint, but it is assertive by modern standards, several times what a current spice cake uses. One tablespoon gives a cake most people will recognise as heavily spiced.
- Method the original omitsCream the butter, beat in the molasses and eggs, then add the flour, spice and leavening alternately with the milk. Molasses batters are loose; expect something closer to gingerbread than a pound cake.
- OvenNo temperature is given, and the recipe names no oven heat at all. Around 325-350F suits a batter of this kind; molasses browns fast, so the lower end is safer.
- Pan and yieldThe batter runs to roughly two quarts — two 9-inch loaf pans or a 9x13 sheet. Loaves take 50 to 60 minutes, the sheet 35 to 45; test with a skewer, as the dark crumb gives no visual cue.
- KeepingMolasses cakes improve after a day wrapped tight. The spice settles and the crumb moistens.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold for charity, and it is usually named as the first Canadian community cookbook of its kind — hundreds of signed contributions, three or four versions of every popular cake. This is the third spice cake in the run, credited to Mrs. J. R. Silliman, and its heavy molasses and heavy allspice place it in the older tradition of dark, keeping cakes rather than the pale butter cakes that were becoming fashionable. The mention of Cook's Friend baking powder is worth noting: chemical leavening was still new enough that contributors named the brand they trusted, and manufacturers in turn advertised in the very books their customers were compiling.