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Breakfast Cake
Two table-spoons sugar, two of butter, two eggs, one cup milk, one (scanty) quart flour, one tea-spoon soda, two of cream tartar; bake twenty minutes in a quick oven. -Mrs. Emily L. Burnham, South Norwalk, Conn.
A plain chemically-leavened cake of the sort meant to be mixed, baked and eaten within the hour. The proportions read dry to a modern eye, and that is the point worth settling before you start.
- The flour is the problemA "scanty quart" is a little under 4 cups, against only 1 cup milk, 2 eggs and 2 tablespoons butter. That gives a stiff dough rather than a pourable batter, closer to a rich biscuit or scone dough patted into the pan. If you want a cake batter you will need to add milk by the spoonful until it drops heavily from the spoon; the original is genuinely ambiguous on which was intended.
- Quick ovenThe book gives no temperature; "quick oven" is generally taken as somewhere around 400 to 425F. Twenty minutes at that heat suits a shallow layer about an inch thick, in an 8- or 9-inch pan or as small cakes on a sheet.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda with two of cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, in about the classic 1:2 ratio. Substituting commercial double-acting baking powder means roughly 4 teaspoons for the pair, though the soda-and-tartar version reacts the moment liquid hits it and will not wait.
- Mix fast, bake at onceCream of tartar is a fast single-acting acid. Have the pan greased and the oven up to temperature before the liquid goes in, and get it into the heat immediately or the lift is spent on the counter.
- Butter measureTwo tablespoons is about 1 oz. This is a lean cake either way, not a butter cake.
- Yield and servingEnough for six to eight as a breakfast bread. Serve warm, split, with butter and preserves; it stales within a day, as all quick breads of this type do.
"Breakfast cake" in a book like this means bread, not dessert: the whole "Breakfast and Tea Cakes" chapter of Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) collects the quick, unyeasted things a cook could raise with soda and an acid and have on the table before the household sat down. Recipes of this kind spread fast after the middle of the century, when cheap purified saleratus and cream of tartar made it possible to skip an overnight sponge, and they are one reason American breakfast breads diverged so sharply from the European loaf. The recipe carries the name of Mrs. Emily L. Burnham of South Norwalk, Connecticut, one of the many contributors the book credits by name and town.