Puff Cake
Three cups flour, two and one-fourth cups sugar, one-half cup milk, three eggs, butter the size of an egg, one teaspoon cream tartar, one-half teaspoon soda, flavor to taste.
A typical late-nineteenth-century supper cake written for cooks who already knew the method: cream butter and sugar, add eggs, then flour and liquid alternately, with the leavening sifted into the flour. The proportions, though, need a careful eye before you commit three cups of flour to it.
- The liquid is the hingeThree cups flour and only half a cup of milk, even with three eggs, gives a stiff, almost dough-like batter rather than a pourable one. Whether that is the intent or a dropped fraction cannot be told from the page; if the batter will not drop from the spoon, add milk a tablespoon at a time until it does. Do not force a dry batter into the pan and hope the oven fixes it.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons; anything from 2 to 2.5 ounces is within the intent.
- Cream of tartar and sodaOne teaspoon cream of tartar with half a teaspoon soda is the homemade equivalent of roughly 1.5 to 2 teaspoons of modern baking powder — modest for three cups of flour. Sift the soda and cream of tartar with the flour so they meet only in the wet batter, and get the cake into the oven promptly; this leavening works fast and does not wait.
- SugarTwo and a quarter cups is high against three cups of flour and will give a sweet, close, tender crumb rather than anything airy despite the name. Reducing to 1.75 cups is defensible if you want it less sweet, and will not upset the leavening.
- Salt is missingNeither salt nor any mention of it appears, which is not unusual in recipes of this kind, where salted butter may have been taken for granted. If you use unsalted butter, add half a teaspoon of salt to the flour.
- Flavor to tasteFor a plain cake of this kind, about a teaspoon of lemon or vanilla extract, or a grating of nutmeg. Rose water was still in use and suits it.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given because the range had none. Bake at 350F. In a greased 9x13 pan allow 30 to 35 minutes; as two 8-inch layers, 22 to 28 minutes; in a loaf pan, 45 to 55 minutes. Test with a skewer in the center.
- YieldEnough for 10 to 12 servings — a family cake meant to be cut at the table, not a layer cake for company unless you split and fill it.
"Puff cake" was never a fixed formula so much as a family name for a plain butter cake that rose well, and versions like this one turn up throughout the American community and church cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s. The cream of tartar and soda pairing is the period's tell: bakers mixed their own leavening acid and base rather than buying the combined powders, which were sold commercially from the mid-nineteenth century. In many nineteenth-century American households supper was the light evening meal of bread, preserves, cold meat and cake, so a simple sweet cake belonged there rather than under desserts, which implied the more formal close of a midday dinner.