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Caramel Cake (One cup butter two of sugar)
One cup butter, two of sugar, a scant cup milk, one and a half cups flour, cup corn starch, whites of seven eggs, three tea-spoons baking powder in the flour; bake in a long pan. Take half pound brown sugar, scant quarter pound chocolate, half cup milk, butter size of an egg, two tea-spoons vanilla; mix thoroughly and cook as syrup until stiff enough to spread; spread on cake and set in the oven to dry. -Mrs. George Bever.
A white butter cake lightened with cornstarch, finished with a cooked brown-sugar and chocolate icing. The original assumes you know how a cake batter is assembled, so the method has to be reconstructed from the ingredient list.
- The hinge: the icingThe frosting is a fudge-type syrup, and everything depends on cooking it to the soft-ball stage, about 238F. Undercooked it will never set; overcooked it turns grainy and hard before it can be spread. Beat it briefly off the heat until it thickens, then spread quickly.
- "Cook as syrup until stiff enough to spread"The period instruction to boil the sugar mixture down to a spreading consistency, judged by eye or by dropping a little into cold water. A candy thermometer removes the guesswork.
- Assembling the batterCream the butter and sugar, sift the baking powder with the flour and cornstarch, add the dry ingredients alternately with the milk, and fold in the seven whites beaten to soft peaks last. The recipe states none of this because it assumes a reader already familiar with cake-making.
- Cornstarch in the flourA cup of cornstarch replacing part of the flour lowers the protein and gives the fine, tender crumb that was the mark of a good white cake. It is the same trick behind modern homemade cake flour.
- "A long pan"A rectangular sheet-cake tin, near enough a modern 9x13. The batter is dense with butter and will need roughly 35 to 45 minutes.
- Oven temperatureNo oven heat is specified anywhere in the recipe; 350F is a reasonable modern choice. Period cooks judged oven heat by hand, or by how quickly flour browned in it.
- ChocolateA scant quarter pound of chocolate here means unsweetened baking chocolate, about 3 to 4 oz. Do not substitute sweet or milk chocolate; the half pound of brown sugar supplies all the sweetness the icing needs.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons.
- "Set in the oven to dry"A few minutes in a cooling or very low oven, 200F or less, to firm the surface of the icing. It is not a second bake, and a hot oven will melt the frosting off the sides.
- YieldA 9x13 cake, 12 to 16 squares. Seven leftover yolks will keep a day or two covered in the refrigerator and are best spent on custard or mayonnaise.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio church-fundraising circles in the 1870s, and its cake chapter is a catalogue of the new chemical leavening: baking powder appears throughout, alongside soda and cream of tartar and even yeast-raised cakes, and baking powder had only become a reliable commercial product in American kitchens in the two decades before. What the book calls caramel cake is not caramel in the French sense of cooked sugar, but the American usage in which any cooked brown-sugar frosting was a "caramel" - here darkened further with unsweetened chocolate. Cakes built on egg whites alone became fashionable in the same period, partly because the yolks could be used elsewhere. The attribution to Mrs. George Bever is typical of the volume, which was assembled from contributions and prints the donor's name with each receipt, a practice that makes these books a rough census of who was cooking what in a given town.