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One-Egg Cake
One and a half cups sugar; one-half cup shortening; one cup sweet milk; one egg; three and one-fourth cups flour; three rounding teaspoons baking powder, and pinch of salt. Flavouring as wished.
This is an ingredient list rather than a method, which was normal for a cake this familiar to its first readers. The proportions are sound; what you have to supply is the mixing order, the pan and the oven.
- Method the original assumesCream the shortening with the sugar, beat in the egg, then add the flour sifted with the baking powder and salt alternately with the milk, beginning and ending with flour. This is the usual order for a cake of this type; the original supplies none.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because many period recipes call for sour milk or buttermilk with soda. Whole milk is the closest match.
- ShorteningHere this may be butter, lard, or a vegetable shortening. Butter gives the best flavour; use 8 tablespoons, softened.
- Rounding teaspoonsA rounding teaspoon is roughly one and a half level teaspoons, so about 4 1/2 level teaspoons of baking powder. That is generous by modern standards for 3 1/4 cups of flour; 3 to 4 level teaspoons will rise well without the metallic edge.
- FlourTaking the cup at about 4 oz, as period tables commonly did, this is roughly 13 oz or 370 g of all-purpose flour. Measure by spooning into the cup and levelling, not by packing.
- Pan and ovenThe original gives neither. The batter will fill two 8-inch round layers, a 9x13 pan, or about 24 cupcakes. Bake at 350F: 25-30 minutes for layers, 30-35 for the sheet, until a tester comes out clean.
- FlavouringOne to two teaspoons of vanilla, or lemon extract with a little grated zest. Add it with the egg so it disperses into the fat.
- YieldAbout 12 servings. With this much sugar and flour to half a cup of fat the crumb comes out fine and on the dry side, so it takes well to fruit, a cooked fruit filling, or a boiled icing.
The one-egg cake is a thrift cake, and its name is the whole point: it advertises how little it asks of the henhouse at a time when eggs were seasonal and expensive, scarce and dear in winter, cheap in spring. Chemical leavening made such cakes possible; baking powder came into wide domestic use in the second half of the nineteenth century and let a cook raise a plain butter cake without depending on beaten eggs for lift. Recipes of this kind ran through American community and manufacturer cookbooks for decades under names like one-egg cake, plain cake, or cheap cake. It is a neutral base, the sort of cake layered with preserves, split over stewed or fresh fruit, or iced with whatever the season provided.