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Newport Cake
Sift one quart of flour; add three eggs, three tablespoonfuls of white sugar, three of butter, two teaspoonfuls of cream tartar, one of soda, one cupful of sweet milk, or sufficient to make a stiff batter. Bake quick and eat warm or cold. This is a superior tea cake.
A Nice Cake. Take two and one-half pounds of flour, one and one-fourth pounds of pulverized white sugar, ten ounces of fresh butter, five eggs, well beaten, one-eighth ounce of carbonate of ammonia, one pint of water; milk is better if you have it. Roll out, cut into cakes and bake. While yet hot, dredge over with coarse sugar.
X. More Good Cakes.
Children's Party Cakes. Take three heaping tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar, two of butter, one of maizena or corn starch, one egg; put with this two cupfuls of flour, half a cupful of sweet milk, a teaspoonful of cream of tartar, half a teaspoonful of soda, a pinch of salt, and Zante currants. Roll this out in powdered sugar, cut the dough in strips, and twist round a thimble-sized pin. Sprinkle over this candied caraway-seeds, and bake in a brisk oven on flat tins. These are called children's party cakes, and also "goody" cakes.
Three related recipes run together here, all of them chemically leavened tea cakes rather than creamed butter cakes. The measurements are by volume and by weight in the old confectioner's style, and two of the three are really rolled and cut biscuits.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in bulk: one quart is about 4 cups, roughly 1 lb / 450 g. Sift first, as instructed, then measure lightly — a packed quart will give you a dough far too dry for the single cup of milk.
- Cream of tartar and sodaThis pairing is the pre-packaged-baking-powder system. Two teaspoons cream of tartar with one of soda is the usual 2:1 volume ratio and does the work of roughly 4 teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder. It reacts on contact with the milk, so mix and get it into the oven without delay.
- "Bake quick" and "a brisk oven"Both mean a hot oven, in modern terms somewhere around 400-425F (200-220C). For the Newport Cake, that means a shallow tin and 20-25 minutes; the twisted children's cakes on flat tins want 8-12 minutes and should be watched, since the sugar dredge scorches.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the buttermilk or sour milk that many recipes of the period used with soda alone. Do not substitute buttermilk here or the acid balance goes wrong.
- Carbonate of ammoniaBaker's ammonia, or hartshorn, still sold for Scandinavian and German baking. An eighth of an ounce is about a teaspoon. It works only in thin, dry cakes where the ammonia can gas off completely — in anything thick or moist it leaves a distinct smell, which is why this recipe rolls and cuts the dough rather than baking it as a loaf.
- MaizenaA brand of cornstarch, the name used generically in period books. One tablespoon of cornstarch against two cups of flour is there to soften the crumb, not to thicken.
- Zante currants and caraway comfitsZante currants are the small dried grapes still sold as currants, not fresh berries. "Candied caraway-seeds" are caraway comfits, seeds shelled in hard sugar; sold by specialist confectioners, or substitute nonpareils and a pinch of plain caraway.
- The thimble-sized pinA slim wooden dowel or the handle of a wooden spoon works. Twist the strips loosely, bake on the pin only if it is wood, and slide the cakes off while still warm — cooled sugar-crusted dough cracks.
- YieldThe Newport Cake suits a shallow square tin of about 9 inches and is meant to be eaten the day it is made. The "Nice Cake" is a large batch — the ingredients together weigh something like 6 lb — and gives several dozen cut cakes.
Cake in an American book of this vintage covers far more ground than the word does now, and this page shows the range: a quick tea cake baked in a tin, a rolled-and-cut sugar cake by the pound, and twisted party biscuits, all under the same heading. What links them is chemical leavening, which had reshaped home baking over the previous half century — cream of tartar and soda sold separately, baker's ammonia bought at the druggist, and pearlash and saleratus before them. Newport, Rhode Island, was a fashionable resort in the later nineteenth century, and the name may well have been attached here as a mark of gentility; no local origin for the cake is documented either way. The name "goody cakes" for the children's twists is the sort of nursery usage that survives only in cookbooks; caraway comfits, once handed to children as a treat and chewed after dinner as a digestive, have almost entirely dropped out of English-speaking kitchens.