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Marble Cake
White Part Two cupfuls of sugar, one cupful of butter, one cupful of sour milk, three cupfuls of flour, two teaspoonfuls of cream tartar, one teaspoonful of soda, whites of six eggs.
Dark Part-One cupful of molasses, one-half cupful of sugar, one-half cupful of sour milk, two cupfuls flour, one tablespoonful of cinnamon, one-half teaspoonful of allspice, one-half teaspoonful of pepper, one-half teaspoonful nutmeg, two teaspoonfuls cream tartar, one teaspoonful soda, yolks of six eggs.
Two separate batters, spooned alternately into one pan and swirled. The recipe gives no pan, no oven temperature and no time, all of which have to be supplied.
- The hinge: don't over-swirlDrop the batters alternately by spoonfuls, then draw a knife through once or twice in a figure-eight. More than that and the two colours blend into a uniform brown, which defeats the point.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and clabbered. Use buttermilk, or whole milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar per cup, left to stand ten minutes.
- Soda and cream of tartar togetherThe pairing does the work of baking powder, and the sour milk and molasses supply further acid for the soda. Easiest to keep the two as written rather than trying to convert to commercial baking powder.
- No butter in the dark partThe dark part as written lists no butter; the molasses carries the moisture. Expect the two batters to differ in consistency.
- PepperBlack pepper turns up in nineteenth-century spice cakes and reads here as warmth rather than heat. Half a teaspoon in this quantity of batter is restrained; leave it in.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will overwhelm the white batter.
- Oven and panThe combined batters come to roughly five cups of flour — a large cake. A 10-inch tube pan at 350F for 55 to 70 minutes, tested with a skewer, suits it; two loaf pans will take about 50 minutes.
- YieldSixteen to twenty slices from a tube pan. It keeps well wrapped for three or four days, and the spice half improves on the second day.
Marble cake was a familiar nineteenth-century American household cake, and the two-batter structure has an obvious economy to it: six whites go into one bowl and six yolks into the other, as here, so nothing is wasted. Earlier versions leaned on molasses and warm spices -- cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, sometimes pepper or cloves -- for the dark half; chocolate marbling, which most readers now assume is the default, spread later, as cocoa became cheaper and more widely available.