welcome friends welcome back to the
kitchen welcome back to sunday morning
the old cookbook show today we're going
to do a recipe out of the blue book of
cookery
this
version was printed in 1932
but it is still the first edition even
though it was first published in 1926
the idea there is that there were no
changes between 1926 and 1932 there are
later versions of this cookbook that go
into the 1940s and 50s that would have
had changes
it's not a community cookbook
but a lot of the recipes are attributed
to specific people like the recipe we're
going to do today is called mrs dudley's
ginger pound cake so in this bowl i have
flour i just put in baking soda
cinnamon
ginger
pretty large amount of ginger and some
baking soda
now
this was a transition time so this was
published first before the great crash
and
continues to be published throughout the
great depression and it's interesting
because the wording in the at the
beginning of the book talking about how
to run your household and
it's already talking about
the economy shrinking
it's already talking about how to make
do with less it's already talking about
how to run your household if you can no
longer afford a full complement of maids
and maybe you can only afford two maids
or one made or heaven forbid you can't
afford a mate at all and you have to do
all of the work yourself so there's all
of these sections at the beginning that
talk about all of these things
that were on the minds of
households in this time period
and so this book really is written for
that
upper middle to upper class
type household
and i've got the butter softened so in
goes some brown
sugar and we'll cream those two together
[Music]
and it's one of those books where some
of the concepts and ideas are woefully
out of date
i don't know anyone who's boiling
carrots
new or old
for an hour
so some of that information is is
woefully outdated but a lot of the
recipes in this book are spot on and
would work really well today and some of
the recipes would work really well today
because they take into account the idea
of a shrinking economy
and how it's getting tougher for some
people
there are some fantastic ideas in here
so it asks for eggs and it asks for the
eggs to be whipped separately before
putting them with the with the brown
sugar and the butter
and some of that i have to imagine is
because
again
some of these recipes are outdated some
of these recipes are outdated even for
the time period that it was published
there's a couple of recipes in here
where i saw that you're beating with a
wooden spoon for an hour and a half
and it doesn't take into account
modern conveniences which
at the time this was published
these stand mixers in fact this very
this very kitchenaid stand mixer that's
here right now
was selling like hotcakes
and had been on the market by the time
this book was published for at least 10
or 12 years so this was not a new
concept in this time period nor was it
rare in this time period so i'm just
going to whip up these eggs
okay i'm going to say that is a stiff
froth
looks pretty frothy to me so we add this
to the creamed butter and sugar and we
continue to beat it so let's get it in
there
really frothy let me get a
spatula and we'll get it all in there
so in this case i don't think i was
beating the eggs together to make them
light and airy or stiff and frothy
in order to bring that light airiness to
the end result
sometimes you're beating the eggs ahead
of time
because it it gives you a better
emulsion in that in that bowl and what
i'm seeing in there is a fantastic
emulsion of sugar eggs and and butter
so i have to believe that's what they
were looking for with this recipe that
it really was about
molasses
it really was about
getting the best emulsification in in
the bowl
and that mixing the eggs and sugar all
together at once just wasn't going to
get you there
because that is an amazing looking
batter at this point so now
i take my pre-sifted flour
and other ingredients and i put them
into the mixer now it doesn't say
anything about multiple additions or
doing it slowly but
i still think that's best practice so
i'm going to put in about a third
put the mixer on
and then i'll just keep adding a little
bit more and a little bit more
okay i'm going to scrape it down now at
this point i add the sour cream and the
molasses
so let me just
scrape down the bowl
so we can get a really good mix
it's a great looking cake batter really
is a great looking cake
batter it tastes pretty good too
okay so
one cup of sour cream
and
now i put in the molasses
i know if i sprayed the inside of this
with cooking spray
it would just slide right out
you can tell me every time i i used
molasses but it's never gonna happen i'm
never gonna do that
now i'm supposed to pour this into a
deep buttered cake pan so i've got a
cake pan the deepest one that i own
buttered with a little bit of parchment
in the bottom
the oven is preheated to 350 degrees
fahrenheit so
we'll get this in
and we'll see what happens
now it didn't tell me what size of deep
buttered cake pan so this is a 9x9
and
might be too small
we'll get it in and see
okay change my mind
bigger cake pan um
it doesn't say anything about doing it
in two cake pans it doesn't say anything
about doing it in multiple loaf pans
most most
pound cakes that you see are done in a
loaf pan so
i'm gonna i'm gonna air on the side of
caution and i'm gonna put it into this
larger pan and see what happens
okay yeah that looks better much better
into the oven
let's see
hey glenn hey jules hey friends
let's see what have we got oh that's
very pretty it looks very gingery i'd
guess ginger cake it's mrs dudley's or
molasses cake ginger ginger pound cake
so it does it's ginger and molasses oh
is it really like a pound cake it's kind
of big for pound cake it's not really a
pound cake the proportions aren't the
proportions are off they're kind of
almost the same but they're off
and it has soda pound cakes generally
don't have soda no
but it's got that that golden color of
mm-hmm
that's got some great texture yeah i
would add more ginger
but it's still it's still got really
good ginger flavor
and the ginger and the molasses are
playing really nicely together
you could put in more ginger just a
little bit more of that creamy texture
that you get when you cook with that
that combination of things yeah that's
really good okay
sometimes
molasses and ginger together can be
overpowering no this is a nice ratio
okay i'm digging that and the
rectangular pan was the way to go the
square pan just would not have worked
like
it wasn't deep enough
i wanted a deep pan
and i none of our i know that you'd be
able to i mean it would be so deep in
the slow cook
yeah i think it would be this was the
better
the better idea okay
this is a really good
ginger molasses cake
definitely so thank you mrs dudley thank
you mrs dudley
thanks for stopping by see you again
soon
you