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Buckeye Cake
One cup butter, two of white sugar, four of sifted flour, five eggs beaten separately, one cup sour milk, tea-spoon soda, pound seeded raisins chopped a little; beat the butter and sugar to a cream, add the yolks and milk, and stir in the flour with soda well mixed through it; then add the white of the eggs beaten to a stiff froth, and lastly the raisins dredged with a little flour; bake one and onehalf hours. Use coffee-cups to measure. This makes a cake for a six quart pan.- Mrs. W. W. Woods.
A large, plain butter-and-raisin cake of the kind baked for company in the 1870s. The two things to settle before you start are the size of the cup and the size of the pan.
- The coffee-cupBuckeye Cookery tells you plainly to measure with coffee-cups. Period cups were not standardised and are usually reckoned at somewhere around a modern cup, give or take. Because everything here is measured the same way the proportions hold whatever cup you use, so pick one vessel and use it for butter, sugar, flour and milk alike.
- Six-quart panSix quarts is 24 cups of pan capacity, more than a standard tube or angel-food pan (about 12-16 cups) and more than two 9-inch loaf tins together, so the pan is generously larger than the batter. The batter is stiff and heavy with fruit and needs a deep pan and a long bake to set through the middle.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the range had none. For a cake this size and this rich, 325 to 350F for the stated hour and a half is the sensible reading; test with a skewer rather than trusting the clock.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk in this period meant naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Cultured buttermilk is the direct stand-in. Modern pasteurised milk left out does not sour, it spoils, so do not attempt that substitution.
- Mix the soda into the flourThe recipe is specific about this and it matters. The soda has only the milk's acid to work with and no baking powder behind it, so any pocket of unmixed soda leaves a bitter, soapy-tasting spot. Sift it through the flour twice.
- Eggs beaten separatelyThe whites carry much of the air in the cake, alongside the creamed butter and sugar. Fold them in after the flour, cutting rather than stirring, or the cake bakes dense and close-grained.
- Dredging the raisinsTossing the chopped raisins in flour keeps them suspended instead of sinking to the bottom. A pound of raisins in this batter is a great deal of fruit, so add them last and fold only until distributed.
- YieldA cake of this size gives 16 to 20 servings. It keeps well wrapped for several days and, like most heavy fruit cakes, slices better on the second day.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Marysville, Ohio, in the mid-1870s — the Marysville editions are variously dated 1876-77 and appeared under related titles — compiled from recipes contributed by local women; the buckeye is Ohio's state tree and its nickname, so the title cake is essentially the book's house cake. It belongs to a family of nineteenth-century American cakes built on the ratio a cook could remember without a book, in this case one of butter, two of sugar, four of flour, with eggs and soured milk doing the lifting. The reliance on sour milk and soda rather than baking powder places it in a period when commercial baking powders existed but had not displaced older methods, while every farm kitchen had milk turning on the shelf. The credit line to Mrs. W. W. Woods is typical of the volume, which prints contributors' names throughout and reads in part as a record of who in the county was known for what.