Apple Cake
Butter the size of one egg, one teacup sugar, four eggs, well beaten, one cup sifted flour, one heaping teaspoon baking powder, bake in four layers.
This is a batter for four thin sponge-style layers; the apple part is the filling the book assumes you already know how to make. Read it as a layer-cake base rather than a finished dessert.
- Butter the size of one eggThat is about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Have it soft enough to cream with the sugar.
- One teacupTeacup measures in American books of this period were not standardised; often reckoned at roughly 6 to 8 fluid ounces, so the sugar may be anything from about 3/4 cup to a full cup. Note that the recipe says "one cup" for the flour, not a teacup, so read the flour as a full cup.
- The eggs do the liftingThere is no milk or water here, so the four eggs are both the liquid and most of the leavening. Beat them until pale and thick before they go in, and fold the flour rather than stirring it hard.
- Baking powderA heaping teaspoon is roughly a teaspoon and a half level, which is a good deal of lift for a single cup of flour; a level teaspoon of a modern double-acting powder will do. Older powders are generally thought to have been weaker and to have lost strength in storage.
- Pans and ovenFour layers from this quantity means thin ones. The recipe gives no pan size or oven heat; for a modern kitchen, 8-inch round pans, buttered and floured, and a moderate oven around 350-375F for 10 to 14 minutes, until the centre springs back. Thin layers overbake quickly.
- The missing fillingNo filling is given. Cakes of this name were commonly filled between the layers with a thick sweetened apple pulp — apples stewed down with sugar, and in some versions lemon, butter or an egg — cooked until it mounds on a spoon. A loose apple sauce will soak the layers through.
- Assembly and yieldFill while both layers and filling are cool, and let the cake stand an hour or two so the layers take up a little moisture. Serves eight to ten in small slices.
Nineteenth-century American "apple cake" often meant not apples baked into the batter but plain layers stacked with a cooked apple filling, a first cousin to the lemon and jelly cakes that fill the same chapters. This one belongs to a whole family of near-identical layer batters that recipe books of the period printed under whichever fruit the filling happened to be, on the reasonable assumption that a cook already knew how to stew apples down with sugar. The reliance on well-beaten eggs and a single spoonful of baking powder also dates it enenough by the later 1800s to be trusted in a cake, but cooks still beat their eggs as though it had not.