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Washington Cakes, Breakfast
Rub two ounces of butter into a pound and a half of flour; add a pinch of salt, two tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar, three well-beaten eggs, and a pint of milk. Beat the mixture thoroughly. Put it into buttered pans an inch deep, and bake the cakes in a well-heated oven. They will be done in about half an hour.
A plain breakfast batter cake, baked in a shallow tray and cut into squares rather than dropped on a griddle. It is closer to a lightly enriched batter bread than to anything a modern cook would call cake.
- Note the missing leaveningThere is no baking powder, soda or yeast here — the only lift comes from air beaten into the eggs and batter. That makes the beating the hinge of the recipe: work it hard and long, and get it into the oven straight away. Expect a close, tender-chewy crumb, not a fluffy one.
- Weights to volumesA pound and a half of flour is about 5 1/2 cups (680 g); two ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons (55 g). Weighing the flour is worth the trouble at this scale, since a cup's worth of error changes the batter completely.
- Which pintCassell's is a British book, so its pint is 20 fl oz — about 2 1/3 US cups (570 ml). Using a US 16 oz pint will give you a noticeably stiffer batter.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered" means granulated sugar ground fine, not modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Ordinary caster or granulated sugar is the right substitute. Two tablespoons in this quantity of flour means these are barely sweet — a breakfast bread, meant for butter and preserves.
- A well-heated ovenA vague phrase; something in the region of a moderately hot oven, roughly 400F (200C), is the usual reading, but it is an approximation rather than a fixed figure. Test with a skewer in the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- The pansButtered pans an inch deep means shallow rectangular tins; one 9x13 in tin is about the right size for this quantity. Butter them generously.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; cut the sheet into squares and serve with butter.
Cassell's ran to hundreds of entries for named cakes, and "Washington" was one of a cluster of American names — Washington cake, Washington pie, Martha Washington cake — that circulated on both sides of the Atlantic in the second half of the nineteenth century without much consistency of recipe. The association with the first President is traditional rather than documented; period cookbooks attached his name to everything from a fruited loaf to a layered jam sponge, and by the time it reached a British dictionary of cookery the label carried little more than a vague transatlantic flavour. What the recipe itself shows is older than the name: a flour-and-egg breakfast batter baked in shallow trays, the sort of thing made before chemical leavening became universal in domestic baking, when a cook's arm and a well-beaten egg were the whole of the rising power.