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Eggless Cake
One and a half tea-cups sugar, one of sour milk, three (level) of sifted flour, half cup butter, tea-spoon soda, half tea-spoon cinnamon, half tea-spoon grated nutmeg, tea-cup raisins chopped and well floured.- Miss Louise Skinner.
A plain spiced fruit loaf built on the sour-milk-and-soda principle rather than eggs. The original gives no pan, oven or time, so the notes below fill those gaps.
- Teacup measureIn nineteenth-century usage a tea-cup is generally taken as smaller than a coffee-cup; most modern readings put it at about 6 fluid ounces, or three-quarters of a standard cup. The book is not consistent enough for certainty, so treat the proportions as a ratio: sugar and flour dominate, liquid is modest. Using a full 8-ounce cup throughout still works, but the batter will be slacker.
- Sour milkThis means milk that has soured naturally from raw, unpasteurised stock — acidic and thickened. Cultured buttermilk is the direct stand-in; modern milk left on the counter spoils rather than sours. Plain kefir or milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup also gives the soda something to work against.
- Soda and acidThe teaspoon of soda is the only leavening, and it needs the acid in the milk to do anything. Mix the batter and get it into the oven promptly; the lift begins the moment the two meet and does not wait.
- Level cups of flourThe parenthetical "(level)" is deliberate; nineteenth-century cooks often measured flour heaped. At a standard 8-ounce cup, three level cups of sifted flour is roughly 12 ounces, or 340 g; at the smaller tea-cup measure discussed above, nearer 9 ounces, or 255 g. Sift before measuring, as instructed, not after.
- OvenNone is given. Around 350F suits it, in a greased and floured 9x5-inch loaf pan for 45 to 55 minutes, or two 8-inch rounds for 25 to 30. A skewer should come out clean and the loaf should pull slightly from the sides.
- Flouring the raisinsTossing the chopped raisins in flour keeps them suspended instead of sinking into the bottom crust. Take the coating flour from the three cups already measured rather than adding extra.
- YieldOne loaf, ten to twelve slices.
Eggless cakes appear throughout late nineteenth-century American cookbooks not as novelties but as practical arithmetic: hens lay poorly in winter, eggs were the household's cash crop, and a cake that spent none of them was worth having on hand. The technique here is older than baking powder — sour milk against saleratus or soda was in common use as a chemical leavening from the 1840s onward, and Buckeye Cookery (first published in Marysville, Ohio, in 1876 as The Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, the title Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping dating from the 1877 reissue) still prints dozens of recipes that rely on it alongside newer powdered versions. The heavy hand with cinnamon, nutmeg and raisins is characteristic of the plain "fruit loaf" family that later, under wartime shortages, resurfaced as the eggless, butterless, milkless cakes of 1917 and 1918. Like much of the book, the recipe carries a contributor's name: these volumes were compiled from the household receipts of local women, and the attribution served as both credit and warranty.