Old-Time Ginger Cake

History

This ginger cake is recipe No. 69 in "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking," dictated by Abby Fisher and printed in San Francisco in 1881. It is a molasses cake built on sour milk and soda: "One pint molasses, one quart flour, one-half teacup brown sugar, one teacup butter, one tablespoonful cinnamon, two tablespoonsful ginger, one teacup sour milk. With it mix a teaspoonful soda and three eggs." Her order of work is exact — cream butter and sugar together, then add molasses, then flour, then eggs, then milk, then the ginger and cinnamon — stirred thoroughly and baked in oblong pans.

Fisher was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in June 1831 to Abbie Clifton. Genealogical research in San Francisco records identifies her father as James J. Andrews, an Orangeburg planter who held some seventy people in slavery, and an 1869 receipt from the Freedman's Savings and Trust in Mobile records her under her mother's name. Before 1865, censuses recorded only an enslaver's name with the age and sex of those he held, so no surviving record names Fisher herself; Karen Hess, who rediscovered her book, noted that absence of documentation. She could neither read nor write and dictated the book, offering it as "a book of my knowledge — based on an experience of upwards of thirty-five years." Her cooking was recognized publicly: a diploma at the Sacramento State Fair in 1879 and two medals at the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair in 1880.

The historical record does not document a specific earlier origin for this particular cake. It survives as Fisher set it down, in her own name, among the Southern baking she had practiced for decades.

Ingredients

• 1 pint molasses
• 1 quart flour
• 0.5 teacup brown sugar
• 1 teacup butter
• 1 tablespoon cinnamon
• 2 tablespoon ginger
• 1 teacup sour milk
• 1 teaspoon soda
• 3 eggs

Instructions

1. Cream butter and sugar together.
2. Add molasses to the creamed mixture.
3. Add flour to the batter.
4. Add eggs to the mixture.
5. Mix soda with the sour milk.
6. Add the milk and soda mixture to the batter.
7. Add ginger and cinnamon to the batter.
8. Stir thoroughly.
9. Put the batter into oblong pans and bake.