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Hayes Cake
One cup sugar, half cup butter, three eggs beaten well together, level tea-spoon soda stirred in half cup sour milk, two small cups flour; flavor with lemon, pour in small dripping-pan, bake half an hour, and cut in squares. This cake is always elected for a "second term."-Miss Flora Ziegler, Columbus.
A plain sour-milk butter cake baked thin in a jelly-roll pan and cut in squares — closer to what we would now call a sheet cake or snack cake than a layer cake. The measurements are loose in the way 1870s receipts usually are, and the pan matters more than anything else.
- The panA "small dripping-pan" is a shallow rectangular roasting pan; the nearest modern equivalent is a quarter-sheet or 9x13 pan. Use 9x13 for a thin cake that bakes in the stated half hour; a 9-inch square pan will need closer to 35-40 minutes.
- Oven temperatureThe original assumes a wood range and gives none. Bake at 350F, which suits a half-hour bake for a shallow butter cake.
- "Two small cups" of flourGenuinely ambiguous. Cup measures were not standardized in the 1870s, so "small cups" may well mean less than two modern 8-ounce cups. Start with 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour; the batter should pour, not mound.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Use buttermilk. Failing that, half a cup of milk with 1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice or vinegar, left to stand ten minutes.
- Soda, levelThe word "level" matters: too much soda in this quantity of batter will taste soapy and turn the crumb yellowish. A level modern teaspoon is on the generous side for half a cup of soured milk, but will work if the milk is properly acidic.
- Method"Beaten well together" glosses over the step that does the work: cream the butter and sugar until pale, then beat in the eggs one at a time. The soda-and-sour-milk mixture goes in last, alternating with the flour, and the batter should reach the oven promptly.
- Flavoring with lemonIn 1877 this most likely meant lemon extract, though grated rind was also used. A teaspoon of extract, or the grated zest of one lemon creamed with the sugar, both work; zest gives a cleaner flavor.
- Yield and servingA 9x13 pan cuts into about 20 squares. Best the day it is made, eaten plain or with a thin lemon glaze.
Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Ohio and published in 1877, the year Rutherford B. Hayes -- then Ohio's sitting governor, who resigned the office days before his inauguration -- took office as president after the bitterly disputed election of 1876. Naming a cake for a politician of the day was a familiar habit in community cookbooks, and Miss Ziegler's contribution from Columbus, the state capital, carries the local pride of a state that had just supplied the White House. The joke about being "elected for a second term" has an edge: Hayes had pledged publicly to serve only one term and kept the promise, so the cake got what the man declined. Recipes of this type -- sugar, butter, eggs, saleratus or soda slaked in sour milk, and flour -- were the workhorse of American home baking before chemical baking powder became cheap and universal, and the sour-milk-and-soda pairing recurs throughout this book.