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Coffee Cake (One cupful of sugar half cup)
One cupful of sugar, half cup of molasses, one cupful of butter, one cupful of strong cold coffee, two eggs, one teaspoonful soda, two teaspoonfuls cinnamon, one teaspoonful cloves, one cupful of seeded raisins, one cupful of currants, five cupfuls sifted flour.
This is a formula rather than a method: the book assumes the cook knows how to build a spiced fruit cake. The proportions are sound, but a few details need translating.
- "Coffee cake" means coffee is in itThis is not the streusel-topped breakfast bread the name suggests today. It is a dark spiced fruit loaf in which strong cold coffee is the liquid, in the same family as boiled raisin cake and molasses cake.
- Assembling itCream the cupful of butter with the sugar, beat in the eggs, then the molasses, then the coffee alternately with the flour. The soda goes in with the last of the flour, and the raisins and currants are folded in at the end after being tossed with a spoonful of that flour so they do not sink.
- The soda is the whole leaveningOne teaspoonful of soda is neutralised by the acid in the molasses and coffee, and there is no baking powder, no whipped egg white and no yeast to help. Once the soda is wet, get the batter into the oven promptly or the rise is spent on the counter.
- OvenBake at 325-350F. A cake this heavy with fruit and sugar scorches at the edges before the middle sets, so the lower end of that range in a lined tin is safer.
- Pan and timeFive cupfuls of flour makes a large cake, roughly two 9x5-inch loaf tins or one 10-inch tube pan. Loaves need about an hour and ten minutes; a tube pan somewhat longer. Test with a skewer in the centre, not near a raisin.
- ButterA cupful is 8 oz, two modern sticks. Nineteenth-century butter was often salted and sometimes very salty; use salted butter and no more, or unsalted with half a teaspoonful of salt added to the flour.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, small black raisins, not fresh red or black currants. Supermarket dried currants are the right thing; if you cannot find them, use more raisins chopped small.
- Coffee"Strong cold coffee" most likely means coffee left from the pot and allowed to cool, brewed strong for drinking rather than made as a concentrate. Cold-brew concentrate is considerably stronger and may make the cake bitter; dilute it.
- Yield and keepingAbout 20 to 24 slices. Like most molasses-and-fruit cakes it improves after a day wrapped tightly, and it keeps a week.
Cakes moistened with cold coffee belong to the thrifty end of American home baking, where the morning's leftover pot was treated as a pantry ingredient alongside sour milk and drippings. Coffee suited the style of cake in fashion in the late nineteenth century: dark with molasses, heavily spiced with cinnamon and cloves, and loaded with raisins and Zante currants. The recipe also shows how far soda had come as a household leavening -- a single teaspoonful, relying on the acidity of molasses and coffee, does the work that yeast or a dozen beaten eggs once did. The name is a reminder that "coffee cake" has also been used for a plain cake eaten with coffee rather than made with it.