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Hard Sugar Cake
Two cups sugar, one cup butter, two eggs, one cup sour cream, one teaspoon saleratus, one-half teaspoon nutmeg; put saleratus in sour cream, flour to mix to handle without sticking.
— Mrs. Martin
This is a rolled cookie dough, not a cake in the modern sense — "cake" here means a small flat cake cut from sheeted dough. The flour is left to your judgment, which is the whole difficulty.
- Saleratus is baking sodaOne teaspoon of baking soda is the direct substitute. Stirring it into the sour cream first, as directed, is correct: it begins reacting with the acid immediately, so mix and bake without long delays.
- The flour is unmeasured"Flour to mix to handle without sticking" is genuinely open-ended, and no honest conversion exists. With two cups sugar, one cup butter and one cup sour cream you are in the range of four to five cups, added gradually until the dough is firm enough to roll; err on the dry side of soft, since these are meant to be hard.
- Sour cream then and nowPeriod sour cream was cream left to sour naturally, and would have varied in richness and tang from batch to batch rather than matching the standardised commercial product. Modern full-fat sour cream works; if you want a sharper, looser dough you can replace some of it with buttermilk.
- Butter and saltNo salt is called for; farm butter was usually salted for keeping, so if you are using unsalted butter you may want about half a teaspoon of salt in the flour.
- NutmegGrate it fresh. Half a teaspoon of pre-ground nutmeg is noticeably flatter than the same quantity from a whole nut, and nutmeg is the only flavoring here.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given because the cook judged her own stove. Roll about a quarter inch thick, cut, and bake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges color. Thinner and a minute longer gives the hard, snapping texture the name promises.
- Chill before rollingA butter-rich dough sheets far better cold. An hour in the refrigerator lets you use less flour on the board, which keeps the cookies from turning tough rather than crisp.
- YieldPerhaps four to five dozen two-inch cakes, depending on how thin you roll. They should keep well in a tin — the hardness the name promises is the point, not a fault.
Hard sugar cakes belong to the large family of rolled, keeping cookies that filled the crocks and stone jars of nineteenth-century American farmhouses, where baking was done in quantity on the days the oven was hot. Sour cream and saleratus are the signature of that kitchen: dairy that had turned was a resource rather than a loss, and the alkali both neutralized its acid and did the leavening, in the years before commercial baking powder became the default. Saleratus u potassium or sodium bicarbonate, sold in lumps to be crushed u points loosely toward the middle decades of the century, though it cannot be pressed for a firm date. The attribution to Mrs. Martin is typical of a community compilation like this one, essentially a neighborhood's baking archive, each contribution assuming a reader who already knew what a workable dough felt like under her hands.