Home › Cake-Making › Cake-Cutter
Cake-Cutter
Tea Cake. Break one egg into a teacup. Fill the cup with sweet milk. One cupful of sugar, one-half cupful of butter, a little nutmeg, one teaspoonful each of saleratus and cream of tartar. Flour to make it the consistency of common sponge cake.
A plain butter cake from the era before baking powder came in a tin, written for a cook who knew by eye when a batter was right. Two things need translating: the leavening and the flour, which the original leaves entirely to judgment.
- Saleratus is baking sodaSaleratus was potassium (later sodium) bicarbonate sold in lumps. Use ordinary baking soda, but see the note on proportions below.
- The soda and cream of tartar are out of balanceEqual teaspoons of soda and cream of tartar leaves unreacted soda, which tastes soapy and yellows the crumb. Cream of tartar needs to be roughly twice the soda by volume, so use the recipe's teaspoon of cream of tartar with only half a teaspoon of soda, or about 1 1/2 teaspoons of modern baking powder in place of both.
- The egg-and-cup measureOne egg broken into a teacup and the cup topped with milk is a period trick for getting a fixed liquid volume. A 19th-century teacup is usually reckoned at around 3/4 cup, though the size varied from book to book; on that reckoning you are looking at one egg plus roughly half a cup of milk.
- Sweet milkMeans fresh whole milk, as distinct from the sour milk or buttermilk used in soda cakes. Do not substitute buttermilk here, since the acid is already supplied by the cream of tartar.
- "Flour to make it the consistency of common sponge cake"A batter that ribbons thickly off the spoon rather than pouring. Expect somewhere near 2 to 2 1/2 cups of flour for these quantities, but the original is genuinely open-ended and the amount depends on how you measure the cup of liquid.
- No oven temperature givenThe original names no oven at all; 350F works for these quantities. In a single 8-inch round or square pan this bakes in about 30 to 35 minutes; as small tea cakes or gem-pan cakes, 15 to 20.
- Nutmeg"A little" is about a quarter teaspoon, and freshly grated is what was meant. Pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its aroma within months.
- YieldOne modest 8-inch layer, or about a dozen small cakes. Best the day it is made, and good toasted the next.
"Tea cake" in an American household book of this period rarely means anything elaborate: it means a plain sweetened cake to be cut and handed round with tea, unfrosted and made from what was already in the pantry. What dates this particular version is its leavening. Saleratus and cream of tartar were bought separately and combined by the cook, a practice that persisted in home receipts for decades after commercial baking powders became widely available in the second half of the 19th century. The habit of measuring by teacup, and of judging flour by comparison to another familiar batter rather than by weight or volume, tells you the recipe was written to be read by someone who had already made a hundred cakes and needed only a reminder of the proportions.