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One-Egg Cake (Two tablespoons melted butter)
Two tablespoons melted butter and two-thirds cup of sugar creamed together, one egg broken in whole, one teaspoon lemon extract, one-half cup sweet milk, one cup flour, one heaping teaspoon baking powder; use chocolate frosting.
— Mrs. Lewis R. Magee
A small, thrifty butter cake built on a single egg, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew how a cake behaves. Everything but the oven and the pan is here; both need supplying.
- Scale and panThis is a single thin layer: one cup of flour and half a cup of milk make only about a cup and a half of batter, which spreads thin in an 8-inch round pan and does better in a 6-inch round or a small loaf tin. Grease and flour the pan, or line the bottom with parchment.
- OvenNo temperature is given; the recipe assumes the cook's judgement. Bake at 350F, 20 to 25 minutes in a round pan, until the top springs back and a tester comes out clean.
- Melted butter, not creamedTwo tablespoons is a very lean amount of fat, and it is melted, so "creamed together" here means simply beaten smooth with the sugar rather than whipped to lightness. The lift comes almost entirely from the baking powder.
- "Broken in whole"An instruction that the egg goes in unseparated and unbeaten, as against recipes that call for the whites whipped separately. Beat it into the sugar mixture until the batter is uniform before adding milk.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk, specified only to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which would have required soda instead of baking powder.
- Heaping teaspoon baking powderA heaping spoon was generally reckoned at 1 1/2 level teaspoons or more. Older baking powders varied in strength; with today's double-acting powder a level 1 1/4 teaspoons is plenty for one cup of flour, and more can leave a metallic aftertaste.
- Flour measureFigure about 4 1/2 ounces, or 125 grams, of all-purpose flour for the cup. Add it last and mix only until the streaks disappear.
- Lemon extractA full teaspoon in a one-layer cake is assertive by current taste. It is meant to carry against the chocolate frosting the recipe calls for; halve it if you plan to eat the cake plain.
- YieldOne thin layer, six to eight small squares or wedges. Doubling the recipe for two layers works, though the batter is lean enough that it stales quickly — it is best the day it is baked.
One-egg cakes fill the plain-cake pages of many American community cookbooks from the 1880s through the 1930s, and the name is the point: eggs were seasonal and worth money, hens laid poorly in winter, and a cake that could be had for one egg and two tablespoons of butter was a cake you could make on a Tuesday. Chemical leavening is what made it possible rom the the 1840s and 1850s but a general pantry staple only later in the century, let a cook get a decent crumb without the four to six beaten eggs an older pound or sponge cake demanded. The lemon extract and the chocolate frosting are equally of their moment: bottled flavoring extracts and cheap cocoa were among the first factory-made luxuries to reach small-town pantries, and such recipes circulated under the contributor's married name, as they do here with "Mrs. Lewis R. Magee."