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One-Egg Cake (One-fourth cup butter one-half)
One-fourth cup butter, one-half cup sugar, one egg, one-half cup milk, one and one-half cups flour. two and one-half teaspoons baking powder, flavor to taste. Cream the butter and sugar gradually, and add egg well-beaten; mix or sift flour and baking powder, add alternately with milk to first mixture. Bake thirty minutes in shallow pans; add chocolate frosting.
— Mrs. Frank N. Rogers
A thrifty butter cake scaled to a single egg, of the kind that filled community cookbooks when eggs were counted. It works as written; a few details need translating.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F; thirty minutes suits a shallow pan, but start checking at twenty-five.
- Pan size"Shallow pans" is plural, so two thin layers may be intended; the batter would also fit a single pan of roughly 8 inches square or one 8-inch round, filled about an inch deep. Split between two pans it should bake in something like fifteen to eighteen minutes.
- Baking powderTwo and a half teaspoons to a cup and a half of flour is heavy by modern standards. With modern double-acting powder that rate can leave a soapy edge and a coarse crumb; a scant two teaspoons is closer to the lift the recipe wants.
- FlourCake flour gives the tender crumb this recipe wants; if using all-purpose, spoon it into the cup rather than scooping.
- "Cream gradually"The hinge of the recipe. With only one egg there is little to carry air, so the butter and sugar must be beaten pale and fluffy — three or four minutes with a mixer — before the egg goes in.
- Alternating additionsAdd the dry mixture in three parts and the milk in two, beginning and ending with flour, mixing only until each disappears. Overworking after the milk toughens a cake this lean.
- "Flavor to taste"Unspecified. A teaspoon of vanilla is the safe choice; lemon extract or a little grated nutmeg would also suit.
- YieldOne thin 8-inch layer, about eight modest squares. It is a small cake by design and stales quickly; eat it the day it is made or the day after.
Community cookbooks compiled by church societies and village clubs are full of cakes named for what they leave out: one-egg cake, eggless cake, poor man's cake, war cake. Eggs were seasonal and worth money in a village economy, and a cook who could get a presentable frosted layer out of a single egg and a quarter cup of butter had something worth contributing under her own name. The generous baking powder is the tell of the era — chemical leavening had displaced beaten eggs as the main source of lift in home baking by the late nineteenth century, and recipes leaned on it hard. The chocolate frosting is doing real work here, adding richness the cake itself is too economical to carry.