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Quick Cake
1/3 cup soft butter 1 3/4 cups flour 1 1/3 cups brown sugar 3 teaspoons baking powder 2 eggs 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1/2 cup milk 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg 1/2 lb. dates, stoned and cut in pieces Put ingredients in a bowl and beat all together for three minutes, using a wooden cake spoon. Bake in a buttered and floured cake pan thirty-five to forty minutes. If directions are followed this makes a most satisfactory cake; but if ingredients are added separately it will not prove a success.
An early one-bowl cake: everything goes in together and is beaten hard for three minutes. The original gives no oven temperature, which was normal when a cook judged her own range.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives no temperature. 350F works for this timing: 35-40 minutes suits a single layer, while a loaf pan will likely want closer to 50 minutes.
- Pan sizeNo pan is specified. The batter fills an 8-inch square or a 9-inch round pan, or a standard loaf pan, to about two-thirds.
- The instruction that mattersThe three-minute beat is the whole method; the recipe explicitly warns that adding the ingredients separately "will not prove a success." Creaming the butter and sugar first, or folding the flour in at the end, gives a different result from the one intended. Use a stand mixer on medium for the same three minutes if you would rather not use the wooden spoon.
- Soft butter"Soft" means genuinely room temperature and pliable, not melted. Cold butter will not disperse in three minutes and leaves streaks of unmixed flour.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons in 1 3/4 cups flour is generous by modern standards. Two teaspoons of current double-acting powder gives a good rise and less risk of a faint metallic aftertaste.
- No saltThe recipe omits salt entirely, as many of its era do. A half teaspoon added with the flour sharpens both the spice and the dates.
- DatesA half pound of pitted dates is about 1 1/2 cups chopped. Toss them with a spoonful of the measured flour before beating so they stay suspended rather than sinking.
- YieldOne cake, roughly 9 to 12 squares. It keeps well wrapped for three or four days.
Recipes titled "quick cake" or "one-bowl cake" belong to the period when chemical leaveners had largely displaced yeast and beaten eggs as the rising agents in home baking. The insistence that the ingredients go in all at once, with the warning that adding them separately "will not prove a success," suggests cooks trained in the older creaming method had to be told plainly not to fall back on it. Dates were a common and relatively cheap sweet fruit for such cakes.