Home › Cake Making and Baking › Mountain Cake
Mountain Cake
1 cup rich sour cream 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 1 teaspoon soda ½ teaspoon cream of tartar 2 cups Five Roses flour ½ teaspoon lemon extract Pinch of salt.
Stir cream and sugar together, add the eggs beaten, then the soda dissolved in a little warm water, then the flour gradually (with the cream of tartar and pinch of salt mixed in it). Add the lemon extract, beat well, and bake for 1/2 hour in moderate oven.
A plain sour-cream cake from a Canadian milling company's promotional book, leavened the pre-baking-powder way with soda and cream of tartar. The batter is stirred, not creamed, so it comes together in a few minutes.
- The sour cream matters mostThe recipe wants thick, full-fat cultured cream — full-fat commercial sour cream (around 18-20% fat) or crème fraîche, not thinned light sour cream and not milk soured with vinegar. The fat is the only shortening in the cake, and its acid is what the soda reacts with.
- Moderate ovenUsually read today as about 350F. Thirty minutes suits a single 8-inch round or square pan, or a shallow loaf; test with a skewer at 25 minutes.
- Pan is unstatedNo tin is named, which was normal in books of this period. Two cups of flour makes a modest batter: grease and flour one 8- or 9-inch pan. In a 9-inch pan the layer will be thin and want closer to 22-25 minutes.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis is homemade single-acting baking powder: the 1/2 teaspoon of cream of tartar with a quarter-teaspoon or so of the soda is roughly equivalent to about 1 teaspoon of modern baking powder, and the rest of the soda is there for the cream's acid. Keep the original split rather than substituting, and get it into the oven promptly — the lift begins as soon as the wet and dry meet.
- Dissolving the sodaThe instruction to dissolve soda in a little warm water is worth following. Undissolved soda leaves bitter yellow specks in a cake this pale.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-spring-wheat household flour, stronger than modern all-purpose. Plain all-purpose flour gives a more tender crumb here and is the better choice; if you use a strong flour, stir only until smooth.
- Lemon extractBottled extract was a common flavouring in cookbooks of this kind. The zest of one lemon rubbed into the sugar does the same job with more character.
- Yield and servingEight small squares or slices. It is a tea cake, not a frosted layer cake — good plain, or with a thin lemon glaze.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal, one of the great flour-marketing cookbooks of the early twentieth century, assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who used the brand. Cakes like this one belong to a farm economy in which cream that had gone sour was an ingredient rather than a loss, and in which cooks still built their own leavening from soda and cream of tartar out of separate tins. The name is not explained in the book and appears to be one of the many decorative titles Cake, Silver Cake, Sunshine Cake that Victorian and Edwardian collections attached to otherwise plain batters.