My Family Recipe

The Oldest Cake Recipe From the Oldest House in New York

The Hendrick I. Lott House, built in 1720 in Marine Park, Brooklyn, is a time capsule of American history—50 years before America itself.

December 28, 2019
Photo by Rocky Luten. Food Stylist: Drew Aichele. Prop Stylist: Brooke Deonarine.

In Marine Park, Brooklyn, on the corner of Avenue S and East 35th Street, there’s a bar called Mariner’s Inn. It’s got a brown wood stone facade and a green awning, an American flag hanging above its door. It looks like a place you might stop in to catch a sports game on a Sunday afternoon, if you were into that sort of thing. It’s next door to a nail salon, which is next to a liquor store, and across the street from a dry cleaner called Classic Cleaners.

It’s also half a block away from the longest continually owned house in New York City’s history.

If you were to pass it by chance, you might not think anything of the Hendrick I. Lott House, which bisects the block behind Mariner’s Inn. You might think, Hmm. That house has an especially large front and back yard. It’s small and unassuming with white clapboard walls and dark hunter green window shutters. It’s surrounded by grass both in the front and the back and sits at an angle to the street. It appears as a kink in the Robert Moses fever dream that is the grid-obsessed New York City organization.

You might not have guessed that this house actually predates Robert Moses, the urban planner who oversaw the expansion of N.Y.C. into Brooklyn and Long Island. Or that inside the house is a hidden passageway that once formed part of the Underground Railroad. Or that four sets of cookbooks, passed through two centuries’ worth of hands, were found sitting on the shelves of its kitchen, collecting dust.

Join The Conversation

Top Comment:
“Love that addition, but does not seem as would be in original recipe, but I think it'd make and exciting addition to the cake (especially if using the improvised apples instead of the currants!) Please advise how to see the original recipe as to be able to try. ”
— Ginny
Comment

Neither did Alyssa Loorya, an archaeologist and historian, until those cookbooks—and the well-being and maintenance of one of N.Y.C.’s most important historical relics—were placed into her hands.

Loorya had grown up near the property. She remembers riding past the house—small and abandoned-looking with a disastrously overgrown yard—on her bike on the way to the mall, yet never thinking much of it. It wasn’t until years later when, as a student in the archaeological school at Brooklyn College, that the Lott House circled back into her life.

The front porch of the Hendrick I. Lott House, which was built in 1720; Marine Park, Brooklyn. Photo by Hendrick I. Lott House

As a grad student, Loorya had explored the grounds of historic houses across the Greater New York area. As she and her cohort began to look for fresh sites to excavate, she remembered the farmhouse at 1940 East 36th Street. Could the ramshackle property she’d spent her childhood skirting around hold archaeological potential?

As it turned out, yes. And then some.


The first Lotts to arrive in North America—Engelbart Lott and his two sons Pieter and Engelbartsen—were French Huguenots who emigrated from Holland in 1652. They settled in modern day Flatbush, a wide, treeless grassland. The prairie and its nearby streams were originally the Canarsee tribe’s summer settlement where they mined the waters for oysters and clams until they were displaced and their population ravaged by the onslaught of disease brought over by European settlers.

In 1719, Pieter’s son Johannes and his wife Antje Folkerson bought a farm in the southern area of the Flatlands and laid the groundwork for a house that would pass through his family for the next two centuries. An ambitious and successful farmer, Johannes amassed a property that skirted along the coast of Jamaica Bay and swallowed the whole of what we today call Marine Park.

The house’s location lends itself to highly fertile farmland. As Loorya puts it, “This area was created out of glacial outwash, so it’s all these highly organic alluvial deposits in the landscape. Because of the high number of creeks and streams, we have a relatively high water table but an exceptionally well-drained soil.”

In other words: Everything grows and it grows really large.

The Lott property owes much of its early agricultural prosperity to the slaves that coaxed its earth. According to census records, the Lotts had 12 slaves in 1803. By the end of that decade, however, Johaness’ son Hendrick freed them all and hired them back as paid workers. Historians posit that the Lotts were abolitionists as Hendrick’s actions predate the 1827 abolition of slavery in New York City.

Another important discovery supports this theory. In 2002, The New York Times reported on a clandestine closet, tucked into the house’s architecture, purported to have hidden slaves making their way to Canada through the Underground Railroad.

The house belies many old artifacts. Some, like the closet, reveal truths about the family’s beliefs, others provide texture on mundane patterns, quotidian habits. A storage bin full of oyster rakes hearkens to a time when New Yorkers ate bivalves like hot dogs. Once while repairing a kitchen leak, the house’s caretaker Wendy Carroll unearthed an assortment of corncobs, assembled together in a pattern. Archaeologists point to a cosmogram, a West African symbolic tradition, as an explanation.

And then there are the cookbooks.

Loorya was gifted the cookbooks by Catherine Lott, whose father lived in the house. She received a box full of recipes in various conditions—bound, stained and stapled pages, journals filled with faded phrases, tears and watermarks and fraying edges. Amidst the flotsam, Loorya and her team teased the Lott residence back to life.

Since she first became involved with the site’s excavation in 1998 as a graduate student, Loorya has been instrumental in the Lott House’s most modern era. She has since founded her own archaeology firm, Chrysalis Archaeology, and become vice president of the board that works with the city to manage and operate the house.

Part of that management means ensuring the city allocates proper funding to the upkeep of the property. At other times, her involvement skews more—quite literally—hands on. Recently, she and her team have been participating in what they call experiential archaeology.

It all began with a cake. First a chocolate one. Then a white one. The recipes, simple cakes in no-fuss loaf pans, reminded Loorya of her grandmother alongside whom she learned to bake. She felt a pang of nostalgia both for her own family and a new one she was beginning to learn about. The kitchen became the flashpoint for animating the Lott House, abandoned since 1998 and falling into disrepair once again.

A recipe for "Demon Cake" produced a sludgy molasses cake so sticky it had to be begged out of the bowl.

A recipe for "Demon Cake," likely named due to its dark, gingered spiciness and black molasses-heavy batter. Photo by Hendrick I. Lott House

The recipes with their dated ingredient lists and reliance on outdated products clashed with modernity. “It so often says to bake in a modern oven and I’m like … what does that mean?” Loorya laments. “A modern oven? Do we have a temperature? Do we have a time? No!”

The directions for Grandma Voorhee’s mincemeat pie begin by imploring one to “get a cow.” It later suggests leaving something in a stoneware crock on the porch for three weeks. Another recipe sent Loorya to the grocery store looking for Borden’s condensed coffee, only to discover that she was actually in search of a coffee concentrate that existed around the time of World War I.

The recipes have proven valuable to Loorya and her team. They feel closer to the Lotts and this project than they do to many others.

“In one of the photos I have, they took a dining room table and put it out on the front lawn. The table was set and everything,” Loorya tells me. “Any one of those items in that cookbook could’ve been on that table.”

It’s this ability to forge intimate connections with the past that brought Loorya to archaeology. Rather than the promise of grandeur or the golden relics of history’s greats, it’s the way a dusty photograph, or a fleeting slice of cake, can animate the past that tethers Loorya to the project.

A Lott House garden party. Photo by Hendrick I. Lott House

“‘It’s kind of my baby.”

Caitlin Welks, an archaeologist who works at Chrysalis with Loorya, has also taken a particular liking to the Lott House. When we talk on the phone, she excitedly points my attention to the ways recipes reveal the passage of time. Presented in chronological order they function as an archive, and by combing through them from back to front you can watch the way technologies, tastes, and trends evolve.

“You go from the turn of the century,” says Welks, “to Wheaties.”

The recipes also work as farm records. In one year, for instance, they harvested over 400 heads of cabbage. There appeared in the cookbook, suddenly, dozens of recipes for canning and preserving cabbage.

“New York City could not become the city we know today, this international capital—which it has been since the 17th century—without the support of the farms in the outer boroughs, growing the food so [those in the city] could focus on business,” Loorya tells me. “The Lotts were one of those families.”

...built as Swift began Gulliver's Travels and Bach completed the Brandenburg Concertos; a home to scores of women and men, immigrant and native-born, enslaved and free, who helped transform a wild land into New York City.
Friends of the Lott House

The last person to live in the Lott House was a woman named Ella Suydam. Born in 1890, she watched the neighborhood transform from flat fertile farmland to suburban sprawl. When the Great Depression struck, the property’s borders closed in on Ella and her family as they sold off land to stay afloat. And in over a decade from 1920 to 1930, the neighborhood experienced a 1600% increase in population: a stolid reminder that while rampant development may feel like a uniquely modern fixation, New York City has been growing at a gallop for well over a century.

Neighbors remember helping out the woman who lived in the old house. They hosed down the wooden slats on the Fourth of July to prevent fireworks from setting the house ablaze and delivered groceries to the front porch. When I ask Loorya what she remembers of the house, she recalls riding her bike by an image of Ella standing fragile in the front yard cutting roses and picking her berry bushes

Ella died in 1989. In 2002, the Lott descendants sold the house back to the city. You could fit 22 modern Brooklyn row houses along the property, but instead of developing, the city landmarked the property. It is now on the national register of historical places.

This fall marks 300 years since the earliest Lotts started construction on the property.

Today, the house functions mainly as a historical relic. The exteriors and the landscapes have been redone and there’s a farm plot on the property that Loorya, Welks, and a group of volunteers fiddle with.

They grow things that they knew the family liked. Last year it was cucumbers. Because of the highly fertile soil, they often end up with enormous amounts: The president of the board had his mom jarring bread and butter pickles for months the previous harvest. After a cabbage haul, Loorya swears to never eat coleslaw again.

Loorya wants to make the Lott House important to Marine Park again, to service the neighborhood it once fully encompassed. “I would love to have a farmers market down here,” she tells me, “and produce some stuff that we could then turn back to the community or make farm products. I think that would be a fabulous long term project.”

They hope to plant pumpkins and host a fall festival, as well.


The Hendrick I. Lott House is more than just a historic home. It's a time capsule of American history—50 years before America itself.

If you were to drive—or, say, bike—down East 36th Street in Marine Park, Brooklyn, you might not know that the white-paneled house nestled between brownstones was once the epicenter of the entire neighborhood. And unless you were to connect the cartographic dots between Lott Avenue in Brownsville and Lott Street in Flatbush, you might never come to realize that all those city blocks once belonged to one family.

And unless you had grown up in Marine Park and watched Ella wrestle with the rose rambles in her front yard, you might never think to wonder what secrets this old house, so different from its neighbors, might hold. And unless, like Loorya, you were handed a box of old recipes, an opportunity to invite the past into the present, you might never imagine what the insides of that house smelled like on a long Sunday afternoon.

But now, 300 years after the Lott family first turned their soil, it continues to bear blossoms. In fact, this year’s cherry trees gave up more fruit than ever.

Got a family recipe you'd like to share? Email [email protected] for a chance to be featured.
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Valerio is a freelance food writer, editor, researcher and cook. He grew up in his parent's Italian restaurants covered in pizza flour and drinking a Shirley Temple a day. Since, he's worked as a cheesemonger in New York City and a paella instructor in Barcelona. He now lives in Berlin, Germany where he's most likely to be found eating shawarma.

58 Comments

Vera M. May 5, 2020
What an intriguing article! I'm with those who prefer the original recipe. I will admit that I am prejudiced since I write a blog that focuses partially on vintage recipes.
Adding apples totally changes the taste and texture of the cake. I was surprised since the thrust of this very interesting article was about archaeology, that no attempt was made to date the recipe. There are clues in the recipe, since baking powder wasn't used until the 1860s in the U.S. Before that date, baking soda (at first home made and later commercial) and eggs (mostly alone--particularly in colonial days) were used for leavening, I would guess that the recipe dates some time between 1840 when commercial baking soda was introduced and the 1860s when baking powder was more commonly used.
Also, currants were a prevalent fruit in baking in the late 18th and early 19th century, if you peruse cookbooks from that period.
The recipe as originally written is MUCH spicier than the revised recipe. I also agree with those who have pointed out that crystallized ginger is a very different ingredient that preserved ginger. Housewives might be expected to have their homemade preserved ginger to use in baking. Sometimes modernization of recipes might be necessary, but it seems that some of the changes in this recipe totally miss the mark.
 
knothead February 2, 2020
Made this today. So intrigued by the story, recipe and history involved. We'll enjoy it late tomorrow with our Super Bowl dinner! Sure enjoyed the aroma while it was baking!!!
 
clintonhillbilly January 27, 2020
Enjoyed this article!
 
Jeanne January 25, 2020
Made this today for dessert, with minor changes. Namely, used a vegan oleo, chickpea liquid for the egg (3 tbsp), and soy milk. This is a delicious cake and the apples help make it. It is not really like any gingerbread I've made, much more spicy and richer too. Love the history behind it, which makes it even better. Looking forward to seeing the older recipe Karen researched!
 
Paula W. January 20, 2020
Found this article very interesting and thought provoking. It made me want to go back in time to see that part of the city before it was city streets... and the gardens it contained. Hope to make this soon... I am not seeing a version with currants... but was interested in the comments about stem ginger. I may have to try it both ways. What a wonderful profession to be able to dig through these pieces of history! Thank you Food 52 for sharing.
 
KareninOttawa January 20, 2020
For those looking to make the original cake, This recipe seems to be the same one found in a cookbook called “
American Dishes and how to Cook Them, From the Recipes of an American Lady” published in 1883. A copy is available as a no charge ebook..and the recipe is on pages 162 and 163.
 
Sharon T. January 20, 2020
I looked everywhere for the "No charge" e book and could only find printed versions, plus a rare first edition. Do you have a link for the "no charge" e edition?
 
KareninOttawa January 20, 2020
Hi Sharon, hopefully this link will do the trick. I was able to browse the book and capture an image copy (or a picture of the page) afterwards by using the google play books app. https://books.google.com/books/about/American_Dishes_and_how_to_Cook_Them.html?id=ALpEAQAAMAAJ
 
Lauren B. January 20, 2020
KarenIO, I am extremely grateful for you sharing this info. I went to the url and there was the whole book, including the cover, and it was as though I stuck my head in through a window to this earlier era. Thank you so much. HOW do you come to know this?!
 
KareninOttawa January 20, 2020
Ha! As my husband says..research is my secret talent!
 
mudd January 21, 2020
Wonderful. Thank you
 
DavidC. January 21, 2020
Thank you Karen for caring and sharing. Thanks to you we have the "better" recipe for Demon Cake!
 
KareninOttawa January 22, 2020
You are most welcome. FYI, I also researched spices available at the time in America and think one of the other commenters is correct, they likely used stem ginger in syrup in this recipe and the oven temperature would be moderate (350 deg). Good luck and I hope it’s a success. The cake definitely sounds delicious!
 
mudd January 22, 2020
Karenin, Do you research for a living or avocation? Myself, I always get diverted on the path!
 
KareninOttawa January 22, 2020
Researcher by nature, not avocation. I agree, The trail is always interesting and sometimes, more than the original destination!
 
Kathleen January 19, 2020
Mrs. Voorhees and her recipe for mincemeat might very well have come from one of my maternal ancestors who settled the area at about that time. What fun!
 
Slove66 January 19, 2020
I love this article! thanks so much!
 
Carolyn January 19, 2020
In trying to read the photo of the original recipe I'm seeing preserved ginger in the ingredients - I'm guessing they mean preserved ginger in syrup/stem ginger in syrup - an English/British/UK ingredient [I've found it on Amazon or recipes for making it myself] and NOT crystallized ginger. I think it would be much more tender in the cake than the crystallized ginger and I would prefer that softer texture. And, like other comments, I don't see apples anywhere but do see currants so wonder why the substitution?
 
Lauren B. January 19, 2020
Hello!
1. This was a lovely, well written article. Thanks.

2. I am looking forward to trying this recipe. I will do it once with the apples but will also try it with currants, or maybe raisins. Ha or maybe a little of each!

3. How in the world can people start making snide comments about other commenters on a culinary site like this??!! Grow up and play nice already!

4. What the heck is a KIA anyway? It’s not even on urban dictionary.

5. What I really wanted to know, if possible, is how old is the Devil Cake recipe? Ballpark # would be fine, like what century is it from?
 
Mary B. January 19, 2020
KIA. know it all
 
Lauren B. January 19, 2020
LOL thank you! Sheesh what kind of a person is griping about other people who are sharing info? Gimme a break!!
 
jessica W. January 19, 2020
For those feeling picky, here is a list of the oldest buildings in New York: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_buildings_in_New_York

I'm not sure this is the longest-occupied house either. The John Bowne House in Flushing was built in 1661 and occupied by the family until 1945.

Still, the history is fascinating.
 
Leslie M. January 19, 2020
I have passed by this home many times. I remember it being renovated. There is also the Wykoff-Bennett Homestead just over a mile away on East 22nd Street off of Avenue P. It dates back to 1766. You can’t go in though because a family still resides there. There are quite a few of these homes scattered throughout Flatbush, Canarsie and Gravesend. A few of them are also still private residences. It’s amazing that these structures have survived. New construction/condos are taking over these neighborhoods. It’s nice to still have a piece of history down your block.
 
Ginny January 19, 2020
Great story! Loved the history and info on the foods and recipes. I did not see a copy of the original recipe in the article and would love to be able to read it. I too can be "pedantic and chuckle at the corrections" - when referring to the berry, it is spelled 'currant', not current, such as in ocean currents or electrical currents.... :) I was puzzled at the comment that apples were added and currants left out and not in the original recipe because IMO apples would not be a good substitute for currants at all and this being a dense type of spice cake, I think the original currants would be better. Was crystallized ginger in the original recipe? Love that addition, but does not seem as would be in original recipe, but I think it'd make and exciting addition to the cake (especially if using the improvised apples instead of the currants!) Please advise how to see the original recipe as to be able to try.
 
Douglas January 19, 2020
I also would enjoy reading a copy of the original recipe.
Chrysalis Archaeology appears to have done a wonderful job in this project.
Isn't history great. Too bad certain leaders of our country have never appreciated it.
 
Lucy B. January 19, 2020
Who are the leaders you are referring to?
 
mudd January 19, 2020
It was probably stem ginger in syrup.
 
Douglas January 19, 2020
Donald Trump plus most Republicans in Congress.
 
Lucy B. January 19, 2020
How wonderful that you can read peoples minds! I know that I can read your mind! Love for your fellow man.🌍🌍🌍
 
Lucy B. January 19, 2020
Love is in your heart! 🌍🌍🌍
 
mudd January 20, 2020
Oh, currant v current, spelling auto “correct”. Always tries to “correct” the spelling of my first name!
 
pam January 19, 2020
Thank you so much for this wonderful story and pictures. Such joy having recipes to connect to this home. I am a decendant from The Arnold House whose home was built in the 1600 with a tavern added for people passing thru. It is contained by the historical society in Lincoln Rhode Island but no recipes that I know of.
 
Misch B. January 19, 2020
Growing up in the Rockaway's I probably drove past this house/farm hundreds of times....I'm so glad it's still there....and that city decided to save it...
 
Peaches January 19, 2020
Thank you for this wonderful story. I've never been east of the Rocky Mts so my ideas of New York and Brooklyn are mainly from books (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) movies and the news. Thank you for expanding my view into another part of our world.
 
Sharon T. January 19, 2020
To those stating that the historic descriptions are wrong, I could not find that the house was described as the "oldest" house. The text says the house is the longest continuously owned house. I also appreciate the comment that mentions the Joy of Cooking, which just has a new edition out. That is part of my family lore, since my late brother-in-law, Mark Becker and my sister Jennifer Becker Sakurai worked on the book for years, as did my mother, Bessie Chapin. Mark is the older son of Marion Rombauer Becker, the co-author and daughter of Irma, who wrote the original book. Indeed the old Joy was the place you could learn all kinds of things, including the temperature for a "slow oven."
 
Nina A. January 19, 2020
You have such wonderful stories and all of the recipes I've tried from your site have been delicious. Thank you so much for your attention to detail and beauty!
 
Skivari January 19, 2020
What an incredible place the Lott house appears to be. I can smell the food at the family gatherings. It must have been a wonderful place to live back when; thanks you for a fantastic read as well as the Demon cake recipe.
 
sh0rtydu0p January 8, 2020
What an interesting story and history - thank you for sharing.