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One-Egg Cake
One cup butter, one and a half cups sugar, three of flour, one of sweet milk, one egg, tea-spoon soda, two tea-spoons cream tartar in the flour, cup raisins chopped fine. - Mrs. A. S. C.
A typical Buckeye Cookery entry: ingredients in a list, no method, no pan, no oven. The proportions are sound, but everything else has to be supplied.
- Read the leavening firstOne teaspoon soda with two teaspoons cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, and the cream of tartar is deliberately sifted into the flour so the two do not meet until the batter is wet. Mix them in dry, work quickly once the milk goes in, and get the cake into the oven — the rise begins immediately and does not wait.
- MeasuresCup measures were not standardized when this was printed; read the cup as the modern 8 oz cup and 1 cup butter is 2 sticks (about 225 g), 1 1/2 cups sugar about 300 g, 3 cups flour about 375 g. No salt is listed; if using unsalted butter, about 1/2 teaspoon is a reasonable addition.
- Sweet milkFresh whole milk, specified only to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which in recipes of this kind were paired with soda alone. Substituting buttermilk here adds acid the formula has not accounted for.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter and sugar, beat in the egg, then add the flour mixture and milk alternately in two or three additions. One egg gives little structure, so the creaming is what carries the crumb — take it to genuinely pale and light.
- The raisinsChop them fine as directed and toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in, or they will sink through a batter this soft.
- Oven and panThe recipe specifies neither. A moderate oven, around 350F, works; the batter should fill a 9x13 pan or two 8-inch rounds; roughly 30 to 35 minutes for the sheet, 25 to 30 for the layers, until a skewer comes out clean and the edges pull from the tin.
- Yield and keepingAbout 12 to 16 squares. It is a plain everyday cake, best the day it is baked or split and buttered the next — a thin lemon or vanilla glaze suits it better than frosting.
"One-egg cake" is a name that advertises its own economy: eggs were seasonal and dear, and a cake that needed only one could be made in late winter when hens had stopped laying. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Marysville, Ohio and first published in 1877, is full of such contributed formulas, each signed with a contributor's initials and each assuming the reader already knows how to cream butter and judge her oven. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing dates the recipe as much as the name does; commercial baking powders were on the market by the 1870s, but plenty of cooks went on combining the two acids and alkalis themselves. The chopped raisins do the work that spice or frosting would do in a richer cake, distributing sweetness through a crumb that is otherwise deliberately plain.