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Cream Cake (One and one-half cups of flour)
One and one-half cups of flour, one cup of sugar, three eggs, one teaspoon cream tartar, one and one-half teaspoons of soda. Cream for Cake-One cup of sugar, two eggs, stirred in a pint of boiling milk; flavor with lemon.
— Mrs. H. T. Jones
A community-cookbook shorthand: the writer assumed you already knew how a cake batter goes together and only recorded the proportions. Two things in it need attention before you bake — the leavening ratio and the missing thickener in the filling.
- The leavening is backwardsCream of tartar and soda work in roughly two parts acid to one part soda; here the soda is half again as much as the cream of tartar. As written the cake will taste soapy and metallic and may brown too dark. Use 1 teaspoon cream of tartar with 1/2 teaspoon soda, or substitute 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder and omit both.
- No liquid and no fatThere is no butter and no milk in the cake itself, which makes this a plain sponge leavened by beaten eggs as much as by the powders. Beat the eggs and sugar until thick and pale, then fold in the sifted flour and leavening so the air survives.
- OvenThe receipt names no oven, pan or time. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern default; the batter is small, so expect thin layers -- roughly 25 minutes in two 8-inch pans or a single sheet. It is done when the centre springs back and the edges pull from the pan.
- The filling needs a thickenerThe filling is thin -- One cup sugar and two eggs stirred into a pint of boiling milk will not set into anything readily spreadable. Many period "cream for cake" fillings include a starch, and it may have been assumed here; if you want a spreadable filling, whisk 3 to 4 tablespoons of cornstarch or 1/4 cup flour into the sugar and eggs before adding the milk.
- Do not dump the eggs into boiling milkTemper them: whisk a ladle of the hot milk into the egg-sugar mixture, return it all to the pan, and cook over medium heat, stirring, until it thickens and just bubbles. Straight into a boiling pint they will scramble.
- Flavour with lemonThis would have meant lemon extract, a few drops, or the grated rind. Add either off the heat; lemon juice stirred into hot milk can curdle it.
- Assembly and yieldAssembly -- Cool the cream completely with a film of plastic on its surface, then spread between the layers. Refrigerate -- a milk-and-egg filling does not keep at room temperature.
"Cream cake" in nineteenth-century American cookbooks often meant not a cake made with cream but a plain cake split or layered and filled with a cooked custard, a construction related to what is sold today as Boston cream pie. The separate measures of cream of tartar and soda point to the period when commercial baking powder had not yet displaced buying acid and alkali separately. The terseness is characteristic of church-and-society compilations, whose contributors recorded proportions rather than method.