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Aunt Hettie's Loaf Cake
Two cups sugar and one of butter beaten to a cream, three eggs, the whites beaten separately, three cups flour with one tea-spoon cream tartar stirred in, yolks of the eggs stirred well with the sugar and butter; now add two cups more flour with one tea-spoon cream tartar, one cup sweet milk and the whites of the eggs, and then stir again; add one nutmeg, one pound raisins or currants dredged with flour, one tea-spoon soda dissolved in four table-spoons of water. This makes two nice loaves, and is excellent.
A plain rich butter cake of the sort every 19th-century household kept in hand for company. The original gives no pan size, temperature or time, so those are the gaps to fill.
- The hinge: leavening in two partsThe two teaspoons of cream of tartar are stirred into the flour and the single teaspoon of soda goes in last, dissolved in water. Together they are the equivalent of about four teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder, but this pairing reacts at once in the batter, so have the pans buttered and the oven hot before the soda goes in, and get the loaves in immediately.
- Flour totalThree cups, then two cups more — five cups in all, roughly 1 lb 5 oz to 1 lb 8 oz of modern all-purpose flour depending on how you measure. Nineteenth-century cups of soft winter-wheat flour were lighter than today's; if the batter seems stiff, hold back the last half cup.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk used in soda-only cakes. Do not substitute buttermilk here; the acid is already accounted for by the cream of tartar.
- One nutmegA whole grated nutmeg comes to about 2 to 3 teaspoons — assertive by current taste, and the only flavoring in the cake apart from the fruit. One to one and a half teaspoons, freshly grated, reads as a well-spiced cake rather than a medicinal one.
- Dredging the fruitToss the pound of raisins or currants with a couple of tablespoons taken from the measured flour, not extra flour. The coating keeps them suspended rather than sinking into a band at the bottom.
- Pans and ovenTwo 9 x 5 inch loaf pans, buttered and lined on the bottom. The original gives no oven direction; for a fruited butter cake this heavy, 325F for 60 to 75 minutes gives a better crumb, tented with foil if the top colors early. A skewer in the center should come out clean.
- Egg whitesThe whites are beaten separately and folded in with the second addition of flour and the milk. Beat them to soft peaks only — stiff, dry whites will not fold into a batter this thick without breaking down.
- Yield and keepingTwo loaves, about 12 to 16 slices each. Butter and fruit make it keep well; wrapped tightly it improves over two or three days and slices more cleanly cold.
"Loaf cake" in American cookbooks of this period means a rich butter cake baked in bread pans rather than a round layer cake, and the older versions of it were raised with yeast like bread — often said to be a survival of the English "great cake" tradition. By the 1870s chemical leavening had largely displaced the yeast, and this recipe shows the transitional method: cream of tartar sifted through the flour and soda dissolved separately in water, the two acting on each other in the bowl rather than coming premixed in a tin of baking powder, which was still a relatively new commercial product. Buckeye Cookery (Marysville, Ohio, 1877) was assembled from contributions by Ohio housekeepers, which is why so many of its recipes carry a name.