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Yankee Cakes
Beat a cupful of butter to cream, stir into it an equal quantity of sugar, and add a pinch of salt, a flavouring of nutmeg or lemon, grated, two well-whisked eggs, and a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda which has been dissolved in a cupful of sour milk. Mix these ingredients thoroughly, and stir into the mixture as much flour as will make a stiff batter. Butter or grease a dripping-tin thickly. Beat the cake mixture over the fire for a short time. When it is hot, pour it at once into the tin, and bake the cake in a well-heated oven. It will be done in from half to three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 1s.
A plain soda-raised butter cake of the sort that filled tea tables on both sides of the Atlantic. Two instructions here run against modern practice, and the flour quantity is left to your judgement.
- The hinge: skip the heatingThe recipe has you beat the mixture over the fire until hot before it goes into the tin; whatever the intention, heating will spend much of the soda's lift as carbon dioxide before the cake reaches the oven and begins setting the eggs. Mix cold, fill the tin, and get it into the oven at once.
- Cupful measuresTreat a cupful as 8 fl oz. A cup of butter beaten to cream is about 8 oz / 225 g, and the same volume of sugar roughly 7 oz / 200 g. That is a rich ratio for two eggs, so the crumb will be short rather than springy.
- Carbonate of sodaIn Victorian cookery books this generally stands for bicarbonate of soda, what American shelves label baking soda. A full teaspoonful to a cupful of acidic milk is more than modern ratios (about half a teaspoon per cup of buttermilk), so expect some soda flavour unless you scale it back; there is no baking powder in the recipe and none is needed.
- Sour milkNineteenth-century sour milk was raw milk left to clabber, which pasteurised milk will not do reliably. Use buttermilk, or a cup of milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- Flour is unmeasured"As much flour as will make a stiff batter" is genuinely open. Expect somewhere around 2 1/2 to 3 cups of plain flour; stop when the batter holds its shape briefly on the spoon rather than pouring freely.
- Dripping-tinA shallow rectangular roasting tin, not a deep cake mould. A greased 9 x 13 in pan is the closest equivalent, giving a sheet cake an inch or so thick.
- "Well-heated oven"Read as roughly 375F / 190C, allowing that a "well-heated" range oven could run hotter. In a 9 x 13 pan the cake will likely be done nearer the half-hour end of the recipe's range; test with a skewer rather than trusting the full three-quarters.
- YieldCut into 16 to 20 squares. It keeps two or three days wrapped.
Cassell's is a British book, and "Yankee" here is doing the work of a label rather than a place name: it marks the cake as American in method, meaning raised with soda and sour milk instead of yeast or long beating. That chemical leavening spread rapidly through American home baking from the middle of the nineteenth century, since a farmhouse with a souring milk pan and a tin of bicarbonate could produce a cake in under an hour without waiting on a sponge. Cassell's habit of quoting a "probable cost" — one shilling — belongs to the same practical spirit: a cake priced for a household budget, baked in the dripping-tin already on hand rather than a dedicated mould.