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Cream Cake
1½ cups white sugar 1 cup sweet cream ¾ cup butter 4 eggs 1 cup sweet milk 1 teaspoon cream of tartar ½ teaspoon soda 3 cups Five Roses flour Vanilla flavoring Cream the sugar and butter. Break in the egg yolks. Add milk. Put soda and cream of tartar in the flour. Beat well.
Add the well-beaten whites last. Beat the whole a little.
Bake.
Note-An Orange Cream Cake is easily made by substituting 1 teaspoon of orange extract for vanilla in above recipe.
A large, rich butter cake typical of the pre-baking-powder habit of mixing your own leavening. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows what "bake" means, so the numbers below are the ones the page leaves out.
- The cream is never mentioned againThe ingredient list gives 1 cup sweet cream and 1 cup sweet milk, but the method only says "add milk." Almost certainly both liquids go in together at that step, which is what makes it a cream cake. Two cups of liquid to three cups of flour is a very slack batter by modern standards, so expect something closer to a pound-cake-meets-sponge than a stiff layer batter.
- Sweet cream, sweet milk"Sweet" here means fresh and unsoured, not sugared. Use heavy or whipping cream and whole milk.
- Cream of tartar and sodaOne teaspoon cream of tartar with half a teaspoon soda is a home-mixed baking powder at the correct 2:1 ratio. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder does the same job, but the original combination is single-acting: once the liquid is in, get the cake into the oven promptly.
- Butter measure¾ cup butter is 6 oz or 170 g, one and a half sticks.
- Sift the flour with the leavening"Put soda and cream of tartar in the flour" means sift them through the flour so they distribute; dumped in as a lump they leave soapy yellow streaks. Three cups sifted flour is roughly 330-360 g.
- Whites last, folded not beatenThe direction to "beat the whole a little" after adding the whites should be read as the lightest possible folding. The whipped whites are carrying much of the lift in a batter this wet.
- Oven and time350F. In two 9-inch pans, 30-35 minutes; in a 10-inch tube pan, 55-65 minutes; in a 9x13, about 40 minutes. Test with a skewer in the centre.
- YieldEnough for a two-layer 9-inch cake or a full tube pan, 12 to 16 servings. It is a plain-surfaced cake that takes a simple boiled or butter icing.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg, and like most flour-mill cookbooks of the early twentieth century it was assembled largely from recipes sent in by customers. The instructions here trail off at "Bake" without a temperature. Wood and coal ranges had no thermostats, and a Canadian farm cook judged her oven by hand and by experience, so printing a number would have been meaningless to most readers. The homemade leavening is the other period marker: commercial baking powder was widely available by this time, but cream of tartar and soda measured separately remained the trusted method in many kitchens. The tacked-on orange variation shows how the new bottled flavouring extracts were used to spin one batter into two cakes.