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Spice Cake
Mrs. Cook.
One and one-half cups of sugar, half cup butter, half of sour milk, two cups of raisins chopped, three eggs, half a nutmeg, one teaspoon cinnamon, one of cloves, one of saleratus; mix rather stiff ; bake in loaf tins in moderate oven.
A plain 19th-century loaf cake leavened by the reaction of saleratus with sour milk. The flour is not listed at all — "mix rather stiff" was the whole instruction, and it is the one thing you must judge by feel.
- The missing flourNo quantity is given; the cook was expected to add flour until the batter was stiff enough to hold a spoon upright-ish. With this amount of sugar, butter, eggs and milk, expect somewhere around 2 1/2 to 3 cups, but treat that as a starting point rather than a conversion — the original is genuinely silent.
- SaleratusSaleratus is the period name for a chemical leavener: potassium bicarbonate in earlier usage, though sodium bicarbonate (modern baking soda) was also sold under the name. The modern box is the working equivalent. One teaspoon is the full amount for this batter and needs the acid in the sour milk to lift it.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, mildly acidic and thickened. Buttermilk is the usual stand-in; half a cup of buttermilk, or of milk soured with about a teaspoon and a half of vinegar, gives the soda something to react with.
- Half a nutmegA whole nutmeg grates to roughly two teaspoons, so half is about a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg. Combined with a teaspoon each of cinnamon and cloves, this is an assertively spiced cake by current standards, and a teaspoon of cloves in particular will dominate if measured heaping.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350-375F. A loaf of this density will likely take 45 to 60 minutes; test with a skewer in the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- RaisinsTwo cups chopped is a heavy fruit load. Toss them with a little of the measured flour before folding in so they stay suspended instead of settling into a band at the bottom.
- YieldEnough for one 9x5-inch loaf pan filled generously, or two small loaves; the recipe says "loaf tins", plural, though period recipes often use the plural loosely. Cool completely before slicing; the crumb is fragile warm and improves after a day wrapped.
Spice cake of this type belongs to the American sour-milk-and-saleratus tradition, widely used in home baking in the decades before commercial baking powder became cheap and reliable — though sour-milk cakes carried on well after that point. Sour milk was a resource rather than a flaw: in a household without refrigeration, milk turned quickly, and pairing it with an alkali gave lift at almost no cost. Nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves were imported spices, bought in and used freely here. The omission of flour is typical of the period, and the attribution to a named contributor, Mrs. Cook, points to a collected community cookbook: readers were assumed to know what a stiff batter looked like and to need only the proportions.