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One, Two, Three, Four Cake
One cupful butter, two cupfuls sugar, three cupfuls flour, four eggs, one cupful milk (sweet,) three teaspoonfuls of baking powder, a little salt, nutmeg or vanilla.
This is a ratio, not a procedure — the book assumes any cook of the period knew what to do with butter, sugar, eggs and flour. Here is the method the proportions imply, plus the details that have shifted since.
- The method the recipe omitsCream the softened butter and sugar until pale and fluffy, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the flour (sifted with the baking powder and salt) alternately with the milk, beginning and ending with flour. Overmixing after the flour goes in toughens the crumb; stop as soon as it is smooth.
- Oven temperatureNo baking temperature is given; period cookbooks rarely stated one, since coal and wood ranges had no thermostats and oven thermometers were not yet in common household use. Bake at 350F: 30-35 minutes for two 9-inch layers, 45-55 minutes for a tube or bundt pan, until a skewer comes out clean.
- CupfulTreat it as a standard 8-fluid-ounce cup. That gives roughly 8 oz butter by weight (2 sticks), 14 oz sugar, and 12-13 oz flour — the flour is the loose variable, so spoon it into the cup and level rather than scooping and packing.
- Baking powderPeriod powders were generally single-acting and not directly comparable to modern double-acting powder. As written, three teaspoons to three cupfuls of flour is about a teaspoon per cup, which is still within ordinary modern practice; if you find the crumb coarse or tunnelled, or catch a faintly metallic aftertaste, try 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons instead.
- "Sweet" milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified to distinguish it from the buttermilk or clabbered milk that a period kitchen also had on hand. Whole milk, at room temperature.
- FlourPeriod American flour was often softer than much of what is sold today, though this varied by mill and region. If you want the tender, close crumb this cake is meant to have, use cake flour, or replace 2 tablespoons per cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch.
- FlavouringNutmeg means whole nutmeg grated fine — about 1/2 teaspoon — and it is the older of the two options. Vanilla, 1 to 2 teaspoons, gives the plainer modern cake.
- Yield and servingAbout 12 to 16 servings. It wants nothing more than a dusting of sugar, though it takes a plain butter icing or a spoonful of preserves well.
The name is a mnemonic, and that is the whole point of it: one butter, two sugar, three flour, four eggs, in an order a cook could keep in her head without a book. It is a lightened relative of the English pound cake, which used a pound of each of the same four things, and the shift from weights to cupfuls tracks the nineteenth-century American move away from the kitchen scale toward volume measure. The extra milk and the baking powder are what make this version later than a true pound cake — commercial chemical leavening spread through ordinary households from the middle of the century onward and let bakers cut back on the laborious egg-beating that had previously done all the lifting.