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Coffee Cake (One cupful of molasses one)
One cupful of molasses, one cupful of sugar, one cupful of butter, one cupful of coffee, four eggs, one teaspoonful and a half of soda, five and a half cupfuls of flour; bake in layers.
Filling-One cupful of seedless raisins chopped fine, one cupful of white sugar; boil ten minutes; pour slowly on the beaten white of one egg; add raisins.
A molasses layer cake leavened by soda reacting with molasses, filled with a boiled-syrup meringue full of chopped raisins. Two things need decoding before you start: what "a cupful of coffee" means, and what the filling is actually doing.
- "One cupful of coffee"This is a cup of brewed coffee, used as the liquid, not ground beans. Make it strong — the flavour has to survive a cup of molasses.
- Soda and molassesThe 1½ teaspoons of soda are there to neutralise the acid in the molasses and give the lift; there is no baking powder and no acid other than the molasses. Use unsulphured molasses rather than blackstrap, which is harsher in flavour, and dissolve the soda in the coffee so it disperses evenly.
- Flour, cautiouslyPeriod flour was generally softer than modern all-purpose, and cup measures were not standardised, so 5½ cups may be more than you need. With modern all-purpose flour start at 5 cups and add the rest only if the batter will not hold a ribbon; a full 5½ cups can give a dry, tight crumb.
- Salt is missingPeriod recipes often assumed salted butter and left salt out of the list. Add ½ teaspoon if your butter is unsalted.
- Oven and pansThe recipe gives no oven direction beyond "bake in layers"; around 350F is a reasonable modern setting. This batter is large — probably enough for four 8- or 9-inch layers. Bake 20 to 25 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean and the layer springs back.
- The filling's missing water"One cupful of white sugar; boil ten minutes" gives no liquid, which is genuinely ambiguous. It most likely means a sugar syrup: about ¼ cup water to the cup of sugar, boiled to the soft-ball stage, roughly 238F. Treat the ten minutes as a rough guide and judge by temperature.
- Pouring onto the egg whiteThis is a boiled icing. Beat the single egg white to soft peaks first, then add the hot syrup in a thin stream while beating continuously — dumped in, it cooks the white into threads. The hot syrup is what sets the meringue and partly cooks the white, so it must go in genuinely boiling.
- Raisins lastFold the finely chopped raisins in after the icing has been beaten thick and glossy, or their weight and moisture will slacken it. Spread between layers while still warm and spreadable; boiled icing stiffens fast.
- YieldA tall four-layer cake, perhaps 12 to 16 servings. The meringue filling weeps after a day or two.
"Coffee cake" in an American cookbook of this vintage rarely means the crumb-topped breakfast cake sold under that name now; it means a cake with coffee in it, and here the coffee is doing double duty as liquid and as flavouring for a dark molasses batter. Molasses was a cheap sweetener, and pairing it with soda — the two react to give lift without any commercial baking powder — was common nineteenth-century practice. The filling belongs to the family of boiled icings, in which hot sugar syrup is beaten into egg white; raisin, fig and nut versions were one way of turning a plain layer cake into something fit for company.