Adelma Cake
One cup sugar, one heaping cup flour, one teaspoon baking powder, three eggs, a little salt, three tablespoons milk. Bake in three jelly tins.
This is a butterless sponge batter for thin jelly-cake layers, and the original assumes you already know the method. The ingredient list is complete; the instructions are not.
- Jelly tinsThese are shallow round layer pans, roughly 8 to 9 inches across and about an inch deep. Three of them, greased and floured (or lined), give three thin layers meant to be stacked with jam or a cooked filling.
- A heaping cup of flourRead this as about 1 1/4 cups, roughly 5 1/2 oz. The recipe is from the era of scoop-and-level-by-eye; weighing gives you the reliable result.
- Oven350 to 375F. Thin layers of this kind bake in 10 to 15 minutes and are done when the top springs back and the edges just begin to pull from the pan.
- Method, which is omittedBeat the eggs with the sugar until pale and thick enough to fall in a ribbon, then fold in the flour, baking powder and salt, and lastly the milk. Much of the lift comes from the air beaten into the eggs, so the volume you beat in matters.
- No fat in the batterThere is no butter or oil here. The layers come out lean and on the dry side, which suits them to a moist filling.
- Baking powderOne level teaspoon of modern double-acting powder is right for this quantity of flour; there is no need to increase it.
- Assembly and yieldFill while the layers are barely warm with jelly, jam or lemon curd, and dust the top with powdered sugar. Three thin layers cut into 8 to 10 servings.
Cakes carrying a woman's given name -- Adelma, Cora, Lena -- fill the supper and dessert chapters of American community cookbooks from the 1870s through the 1910s, and the name is often said to record nothing more than the contributor or the friend who passed the recipe along. The formula itself is the standard jelly cake of the period: sugar, flour, eggs and a spoonful or two of liquid, baked thin in shallow tins and layered with preserves. Before the home oven had a thermometer, thin layers were the sensible choice, since they baked through in minutes and forgave a fire that was hotter or cooler than the cook intended. Such cakes are a reminder that the evening meal in many households was the lighter one, a matter of bread, preserves, cold meat and a plain sweet cake rather than a cooked course.