Loaf Cake
Stir the Snowdrift and gradually work in the sugar, the eggs, well-beaten, and the extract. Sift together the dry ingredients and add them alternately with the milk to the first mixture. Beat well, transfer to a medium-sized cake-pan, which has been rubbed lightly with Snowdrift, and bake forty-five minutes in a moderate oven, 350 degrees F. Cover with any desired icing.
A straightforward creamed butter-cake method, except that the fat is a branded shortening and the page as printed carries no quantities. A few things need translating.
- The ingredient list is missingThe verbatim text gives only the method; no amounts appear on this page. Rather than invent proportions, treat it as a technique note and borrow quantities from any standard 1-2-3-4 style cake (1 cup fat, 2 cups sugar, 3 cups flour, 4 eggs, 1 cup milk, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon extract), which matches the sequence of steps described here.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and the reason this book exists. Any modern vegetable shortening behaves much the same way. Butter can be substituted cup for cup, but it carries water and salt, so the crumb will be less tender than the book intended and the flavor quite different.
- "Loaf cake"In this period the term usually means a plain cake baked in one solid piece rather than in layers, rather than a bread-shaped loaf. A "medium-sized cake-pan" is probably an 8- or 9-inch square or round, about 2 inches deep; a 9x5-inch loaf pan will also work but will likely want closer to an hour.
- The ovenThe recipe helpfully states 350F, which is what "moderate" means in this era. Bake on a rack in the lower third and start testing at 40 minutes; a skewer should come out with no wet batter clinging.
- Creaming order"Stir the Snowdrift and gradually work in the sugar" is creaming, and it is the hinge of the recipe. Shortening holds air well but only if it is at room temperature and beaten several minutes until visibly pale and fluffy; the well-beaten eggs help, and the page's unnamed "dry ingredients" presumably include a chemical leavener.
- Alternating additionsAdd dry and wet in three and two parts, beginning and ending with the flour, mixing only until each disappears. "Beat well" is an instruction from the era of hand beating and should not be taken as license to overwork the finished batter.
- ExtractUnspecified; in a plain American loaf cake of this date vanilla is the likeliest intention, with lemon or almond also possible. A teaspoon is a reasonable amount.
- YieldA cake of this size cuts into 9 to 12 squares. Cool it in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn it out onto a rack and cool completely before icing.
Snowdrift was a mass-marketed cottonseed oil shortening in the United States, produced by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and this cookbook is a promotional volume of the sort that grocery brands issued by the hundreds in the early twentieth century. Their purpose was less to teach cooking than to persuade households that a manufactured fat could stand in for lard and butter in everything from pie crust to pound cake, so familiar standards like a plain loaf cake were rewritten with the brand name in place of the fat. That is also why the fat is capitalized and the flour is not, and why the greasing of the pan gets its own mention. Cottonseed oil had been an industrial byproduct of the Southern cotton crop before refiners found a food market for it, and cookbooks like this one were the means of making that market.