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Hard Times Cake
Half a cup of butter, two cupfuls of sugar, one cup of sour cream or buttermilk, three eggs and one teaspoonful of soda. It can be baked in layers and spread with jelly if preferred.
A terse late-nineteenth-century cake formula that assumes the reader already knows how a butter cake is put together. It also, as printed, leaves out the flour entirely.
- The missing flourNo flour is listed, but the batter cannot exist without it. A cake with this much butter, sugar and egg conventionally takes about 3 cups of sifted flour; add it gradually at the end and stop when the batter is smooth and thick enough to drop from the spoon rather than pour.
- Sour cream or buttermilkThe soda needs the acid in the dairy to lift the cake, so ordinary sweet cream or milk will not substitute. Cultured buttermilk from the carton works directly; commercial sour cream is thicker than the nineteenth-century article and may want thinning with a spoonful or two of milk.
- Soda measureSpoon measures in books of this date were not standardised, so treat the teaspoonful as a level modern teaspoon rather than a heaped one. Much more than that with one cup of buttermilk leaves a soapy taste.
- Method the recipe assumesCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs one at a time, stir the soda into the buttermilk, then add flour and liquid alternately. Bake as soon as the soda is wet; the rise begins immediately.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. 350F suits it: a single loaf or tube pan takes 45 to 55 minutes; two 8- or 9-inch layers take 22 to 28 minutes.
- FlavouringNone is given, which was normal in a plain economy cake. A teaspoon of vanilla, a grating of nutmeg or the zest of a lemon all suit it and none will spoil the chemistry.
- Yield and the jelly versionExpect one substantial loaf or two thin layers, serving eight to ten. If you fill it with jelly, use a stiff currant or apple jelly beaten smooth; a loose jam soaks into a cake this open-crumbed.
Cakes called "hard times," "poor man's" or "economy" cake turn up in American household books of the later nineteenth century, and the name is a claim about the ingredient list rather than the flavour: no milk bought fresh, no cream of tartar or baking powder to purchase, no spices, no icing, and sour cream or buttermilk that a household with a cow already had in surplus. The soda-and-sour-milk pairing was a cheap leavening of the era, predating reliable commercial baking powder in many kitchens and long outliving it in thrifty ones. The note about layers and jelly is the recipe's one concession to occasion.