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Cream of Tartar Cake
Rub one ounce of butter into three pints of flour. Add three tea-spoonfuls of cream of tartar, and a pinch of salt. Dissolve a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda in a pint of milk. Add the milk to the flour, roll out the dough, cut it into cakes the size of a cup-plate, and about half an inch thick, and bake on tins in a quick oven. Time to bake, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 10d. for this quantity. Sufficient for six or eight cakes.
A lean soda scone in all but name, from the section of Cassell's that demonstrates how acid and alkali raise a dough. The measurements are by volume in imperial pints, which needs translating before anything else.
- Three pints of flourFlour was measured by volume here; three imperial pints is roughly 7 to 8 US cups, or somewhere between about 1 lb 12 oz and 2 lb by weight depending on how the flour is scooped. Scale everything down if you want a normal batch: a third of the recipe gives two or three cakes.
- A pint of milkAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, not 16. Add it gradually — the flour you buy today absorbs liquid differently and you want a soft dough that just holds together, not a slack one.
- Carbonate of sodaBaking soda, unchanged. Dissolving it in the milk before it meets the cream of tartar is deliberate: the two react on contact once wet, so the clock starts the moment the milk goes in.
- Leavening balanceModern practice pairs two parts cream of tartar to one part soda by volume; three teaspoons to one leaves the acid in excess, and for this much flour the total quantity of soda is on the shy side. Expect a dense, close-grained cake rather than a light one.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. Chemical leavening needs immediate heat to set the rise before the gas escapes, so have the oven fully up to temperature and the tins ready.
- Work fastThe hinge of the recipe. Once the soda-and-milk hits the cream of tartar the reaction begins, and dough left standing on the board goes flat. Mix, roll, cut and get it into the oven without pause.
- A cup-plateThe small plate, about 3 to 4 inches across, on which a teacup was set. Cut rounds that size and half an inch thick; 20 minutes in a quick oven is about right.
- Only an ounce of butterThat is very little fat for this much flour — these are closer to a plain bannock or soda scone than to a rich tea cake. They stale quickly and are best eaten warm the day they are made.
Before packaged baking powder was common in domestic kitchens, cooks kept the two halves of the reaction separately: bicarbonate of soda and cream of tartar, weighed out and combined at the last moment. Cream of tartar is potassium bitartrate, scraped as a crust from the inside of wine casks and refined — a by-product of winemaking that turned out to be one of the most reliable dry acids available to a nineteenth-century household. Commercial ready-mixed powders, generally credited to British chemists working in the 1840s, gradually displaced the practice, but recipes like this one persisted in cookery books precisely because they teach the principle rather than the shortcut. The cost of tenpence for six or eight large cakes shows how cheap the method was: flour, milk, a scrap of butter and two spoonfuls of chemistry.