Garfield Cake
Two eggs, two cupfuls sugar, one-half cup of butter, one cup sweet milk, three cupfuls flour, two teaspoonfuls baking powder, one cupful raisins chopped, one cupful walnut meats, a little salt.
Like many cake entries in late nineteenth-century compilations, this one gives quantities and trusts the cook to know the rest. The proportions are a standard butter cake, so the usual creaming method applies.
- No method is givenCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the sifted flour, baking powder and salt alternately with the milk. Fold in the fruit and nuts last.
- Oven and panThe recipe specifies neither. As a modern starting point, 350F suits a butter cake of these proportions; the batter would fill a 9x13 pan or two 8-inch rounds, and a tube pan also works. Reckon on 35-45 minutes in a sheet, longer in a tube pan, until a skewer comes out clean.
- Sweet milkThis simply means fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which would have called for saleratus or soda instead of baking powder.
- CupfulsRead these as roughly 8 fl oz, though period cups were not standardised. Flour was measured by volume rather than weighed; 3 cups comes to somewhere around 12-13 oz depending on how it is filled. Half a cup of butter is one stick, 4 oz.
- Baking powder of the periodOlder baking powders were single-acting and often weaker than modern double-acting ones. Two teaspoons to three cups of flour is on the low side by today's usual ratio, but the cake will rise adequately; increasing it tends to coarsen the crumb and leave a bitter aftertaste.
- Keeping the fruit suspendedToss the chopped raisins and walnuts in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in, which helps stop them settling to the bottom.
- SweetnessTwo cups of sugar to three of flour makes a distinctly sweet cake by current taste. The recipe gives no icing or serving instruction.
- YieldAbout 12 to 16 servings depending on the pan. It keeps well for several days wrapped.
Cakes named for James A. Garfield appeared in American household books after his election in 1880, and his assassination the following year fell in a period when commemorative naming was common; the same impulse is generally credited with producing such names as Washington pie and Harrison cake. The name tells you nothing about the ingredients, which are an ordinary cup-measured butter cake enriched with raisins and walnuts. Recipes of this kind are often said to have circulated by exchange between households, which may be why so many are printed as a bare list of quantities: the method was assumed common knowledge and only the proportions were worth writing down.