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Orange Loaf Cake
One cup of sugar; one-half cup butter; three eggs; one cup of rich milk or light sweet cream; grated rinds of two oranges and their juice. Through three cups of flour sift one saltspoon of salt and one teaspoon of bakingpowder. Ice as for Lemon Loaf Cake. This batter may be used for drop cakes as well.
A plain butter loaf carried entirely by orange zest and juice. The original assumes you know the creaming method and how hot your oven runs, so the two things worth settling before you start are leavening and temperature.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. That is the whole salt content, which is modest by current taste; a half teaspoon suits most palates now.
- Baking powderOne teaspoon for three cups of flour is light by modern standards, where the usual rate is a teaspoon to a teaspoon and a half per cup. Expect a close, pound-cake crumb rather than a fluffy one; if you want more lift, two to three teaspoons is within reason.
- No oven temperatureBake a loaf at 350F for 50 to 65 minutes, tested with a skewer. Drop cakes go at 375F for 10 to 12 minutes.
- The juiceTwo oranges yield roughly a half to two-thirds of a cup of juice, on top of a full cup of milk. That is a wet batter for three cups of flour. Add the juice last, and if the mix looks soupy hold some back rather than adding flour, which will toughen it.
- Rich milk or light sweet cream"Rich milk" meant unskimmed milk with a good proportion of cream still in it. Whole milk works; half-and-half is closer to the intended result.
- MethodCream butter and sugar, beat in the eggs one at a time, then alternate the sifted dry ingredients with the milk and finish with the zest and juice. Acid plus milk can look curdled at that point, which is harmless.
- The icingThe Lemon Loaf Cake icing is not reproduced on this page, so what it consisted of is unknown. A glaze of confectioners' sugar beaten with citrus juice to a pouring consistency, spread once the cake is fully cool, is a reasonable stand-in.
- YieldOne 9x5 loaf, or about two dozen drop cakes.
Loaf cake in nineteenth-century American books meant a cake baked in a single pan and sliced, as against the layer cakes and moulded cakes that took more work. The book can tell you to ice it the same way as the lemon version and use the same batter as drop cakes. The orange is doing real work here: until improvements in transport made Florida and Californian fruit reliable in northern markets in the later part of the century, oranges were a seasonal luxury, and a cook who had two of them used both the rind and the juice. Grating the zest into sugar or butter, as the creaming method allows, releases the oils and gives far more flavour than juice alone.