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Huckleberry Cake
One large tablespoon of butter, one cup of sugar, half cup of milk, one egg, one and one-half cups of flour, one and one-half teaspoons of baking powder. Cream butter and sugar, add wellbeaten egg and milk, then slowly stir in flour and baking powder.; flavor with lemon or vanilla. Beat all together and lastly carefully stir in huckleberries.
Bake in moderate oven.
— Miss Dorothy Craigie
A plain one-egg butter cake with berries folded in at the end. The receipt assumes you know your own pans and berries, so two things need filling in: the oven number and the quantity of fruit.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F. An 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan will take 30 to 35 minutes; a loaf pan closer to 45. Test with a skewer in the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- The berries are unmeasuredNo quantity is given. One to one and a half cups is right for this amount of batter — more than that and the crumb will not support them.
- HuckleberriesTrue huckleberries are a wild, seedier relative of the blueberry, picked rather than bought. Cultivated blueberries substitute directly; use them slightly underripe if you can, since huckleberries are tarter.
- One large tablespoon of butterThe receipt asks for a "large" tablespoon, so take it as a generous rather than a level spoonful. Do not be tempted to round it up to a quarter-cup — this is deliberately a lean cake.
- The batter is stiffHalf a cup of milk against a cup and a half of flour gives a thick, almost spoonable batter. That is what keeps the fruit suspended, so resist thinning it; spread it into the pan rather than pouring.
- Folding the fruit"Carefully stir in" is the hinge. Toss the berries in a spoonful of the measured flour first and turn them through with as few strokes as possible, after the beating is finished, or the batter will go purple and tough.
- Baking powderOlder baking powders were commonly single-acting rather than double-acting. One and a half teaspoons of a modern powder is ample; get the pan into the oven promptly once mixed.
- YieldAbout eight squares. It was meant to be cut warm and eaten the same day — there is little fat in it, so it stales quickly.
Community cookbooks like this one were compiled by church and village committees, each contributor signing her own name, which is why the page reads as a note between neighbours rather than a set of instructions for strangers. Huckleberries grow wild on acid upland soil and ripen in high summer, when a cook working through a filled pail would not have needed telling how many berries to use — which may be why no measurement is given. The cake itself is the standard American one-egg cup cake of the period, a formula that appears in dozens of nineteenth-century books and served as a base for whatever fruit was in hand.