Blackberry Cake

 

Blackberries are one of my favorite summer fruits. For over fifteen years I lived in a house with bountiful blackberry bushes. I loved making and eating jam, syrup, pies, and blackbery shurb while the fruit was in season.  This summer, steeped in fond memories of that garden, I screened nineteenth-century cookbooks looking for something new to make with blackberries and decided to try Blackberry Cake made with blackberry jam.

Published recipes for blackberry cakes that call for jam as an ingredient date to back to 1866. The August 1866 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine included it in a section of “Contributed Recipes” There is no information on who contributed the recipe or where they lived or how long they had been making that particular cake.

In 1870 the recipe was included in The Godey's Lady's Book Receipts And Household Hints The Godey's Lady's Book Receipts And Household Hints. “the present volume has been carefully selected and compiled from the best of the receipts published in the Lady's Book”

A slightly altered version of the cake appears in a 1874 Portsmouth Monumental Cook Book for the Soldier’s Aid Society of Portsmouth, Ohio with recipes submitted by members.  There is no way to know how long Mrs. O. F. Moore had been using this specific recipe.

Blackberry cake continued in popularity in community cookbooks in the 20th. century.  Here is an example published in the Cook Book published by the Board of Directors of the Larkin Children's Home in Elgin, Illinois. 

Bringing the recipe more up to date is this 1950 version published in Favorite Recipes by the Federation of Home Demonstration Clubs of Franklin County, North Carolina.