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For the Cake
4 eggs 4 ounces of butter 2 cups of sugar 1 cup of milk 2 cups of flour 2 teaspoonfuls of baking powder Beat the butter, sugar and yolks of the eggs together until light; add the milk and then the flour. Beat well. Now beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, and stir them carefully into the cake; add the baking powder, and mix well; pour into a greased cake pan and bake in a moderate oven for three-quarters of an hour.
A plain butter cake of the old cup-measure school, written as a component rather than a finished dessert. The one thing to change is the order of operations.
- Add the baking powder with the flourThe original stirs it in last, after the whites, which risks either dense streaks or overworking the foam you just folded in. Sift the 2 teaspoons with the 2 cups of flour and add them together; fold the whites in at the very end.
- 4 ounces of butterOne stick, 113 g, or half a cup. Weigh it if you can, but a stick is the same quantity.
- Moderate oven350F. Three-quarters of an hour at that heat suits a single deep pan; check at 35 minutes if you split the batter between two 8-inch layers.
- Pan sizeNo pan is specified. The batter runs to roughly 6 cups, enough for a 9x5 loaf (bake nearer an hour) or two 8-inch rounds.
- Cups in this periodA cup here is the standard half-pint, 8 fluid ounces, the same as now. Depending on how the flour is packed into the cup, 2 cups is somewhere around 9-10 ounces; weigh it if you can.
- Beating the whites"A stiff froth" means beaten firm but not dry. Stop before they turn grainy or start to look dry; whites taken too far break up and are hard to fold in cleanly.
- YieldOne 9-inch cake, 10 to 12 slices, or enough split rounds to build a layered iced dessert.
Sarah Tyson Rorer's Hot Weather Dishes belongs to a small genre of late-nineteenth-century American cookbooks written for the summer kitchen, when a coal range turned a house unbearable and the cook wanted the oven lit once and used well. A heading like "For the Cake" invites an inference, though the text does not settle the matter: probably not a standalone dessert but the base for something assembled cold, or cut up to line a mould. The formula itself is the standard cup cake of the period, loosely related to the old 1-2-3-4 proportion of one cup butter, two sugar, three flour and four eggs that generations learned by rote before scales were common in home kitchens — though here the butter is halved and the flour reduced to two-thirds. Its reliance on chemical baking powder, rather than beaten eggs alone or saleratus and sour milk, marks it as thoroughly modern for its day.