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One-Two-Three-Four Cake
One cup each of butter and milk; two scant cups sugar; three cups flour; four eggs; two small teaspoons baking powder.
This is a ratio recipe rather than a set of instructions: the numbers one through four name the butter, sugar, flour and eggs, and the cook is assumed to know what to do with them. Everything below fills in what the original leaves to experience.
- The method it assumesCream the softened butter with the sugar until pale and light, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk, ending with flour. Overmixing after the flour goes in is the one thing that will ruin it, producing a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- OvenBake at 350F. A wood-range cook would have called this a moderate oven, and the batter is rich enough that a hotter oven sets the crust before the centre rises.
- "Two scant cups sugar"Scant means filled just below the rim, roughly 13 oz or about 370 g rather than a level 400 g. The reduction matters here because the batter is already a soft, sweet one against this much butter.
- ButterOne cup is 8 oz, two American sticks, 225 g. Period butter was often lightly salted and worked by hand; if using unsalted butter, consider adding 1/2 teaspoon salt, which the recipe never mentions.
- Baking powder"Two small teaspoons" of a period tartrate powder would have been single-acting, working the moment it met the milk. With modern double-acting powder, two level teaspoons for three cups of flour is on the low side; get the batter into the oven promptly regardless.
- FlourHousehold flour of the period was generally softer than modern bread flour and is best approximated by cake or all-purpose flour. Measure by spooning into the cup and levelling, about 360 g, and sift as the period cook would have.
- EggsFour large eggs, about 200 g out of shell, is a fair equivalent; bring them to room temperature or the creamed butter may curdle.
- Pans and yieldThe batter comes to roughly 3 lb and fills two 9-inch round layers, a 10-inch tube pan, or a 9-by-13 sheet. Layers take 25 to 30 minutes, a tube pan 50 to 60. It serves 12 to 16.
One-Two-Three-Four Cake is a mnemonic recipe, the sequence of numbers being the whole recipe, with the milk and leavening appended to the pattern; it is often said that such a formula could be carried in the head and passed on without pen or paper. It descends directly from pound cake, which used a pound each of butter, sugar, flour and eggs; as chemical leavening became reliable in the second half of the nineteenth century, cooks could cut the butter and eggs back against the flour and still get a risen, tender crumb, and the one-two-three-four proportion is the result. The same proportion circulates in an enormous number of American community and household cookbooks across the nineteenth century, sometimes under other names such as cup cake, and the appeal is plain: this is the neutral, sturdy base that gets split, layered and filled with whatever fruit or preserve the season offers.