Cake: Calumet
Surprise Cake. 4 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 cupful sugar, 1 egg, 1 cupful milk, 2 cupfuls flour, 4 teaspoonfuls baking powder, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla.
Mix carefully, and bake like nursery cake.
Plain Wedding Cake. cupful butter, 1½ cupfuls sugar, Yolks 3 eggs, ½ cupful milk, 2½ cupfuls flour, 3½ teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, 1 teaspoonful cinnamon, teaspoonful ground cloves, ½ teaspoonful grated nutmeg, teaspoonful powdered mace, cupful seeded raisins washed, dried, and cut in pieces, cupful currants washed, and dried, + pound citron cut in small, thin pieces, Whites 3 eggs.
Roll fruit in cupful flour, and sift the rest with baking powder and spices. Mix like feather cake, adding the floured fruit just before the stiffly beaten whites of eggs. Bake in a thick loaf, in a moderate oven.
Cover with a plain, white icing.
Three closely related butter cakes from a baking-powder promotional page: two plain one-egg cakes and a lightly fruited loaf. The proportions are sound, but the print is damaged in places and the leavening runs high.
- Missing fractionsThe wedding cake reads "cupful butter" and "+ pound citron" where the original fractions have dropped out of the type. Judging by the rest of the formula, half a cup of butter and a quarter pound of citron are the plausible readings, but the book as printed does not say so; treat those two amounts, plus the unfractioned cloves and mace, as genuinely uncertain.
- Baking powderFour teaspoonfuls to two cupfuls of flour is roughly double what a modern cook would use. Period baking powders varied in strength and consistency, and this page exists to sell Calumet. With current double-acting powder, 2 to 2½ teaspoonfuls per two cups of flour gives a better crumb and no soapy aftertaste.
- OvenA moderate oven is usually reckoned at about 350F. The shallow pans of nursery and surprise cake will take about 30 minutes as stated; the fruited loaf, baked thick, will need considerably longer and should be tested with a skewer.
- Water versus milkNursery cake is made with cold water rather than milk, a common economy in plainer cakes, though the book gives no reason. Surprise cake is the same formula with milk and an extra tablespoonful of butter, and is noticeably richer.
- McIlhenny's Mexican VanillaA brand-name extract of the period, no longer sold. Any good vanilla extract answers. Avoid Mexican "vanilla" sold cheaply as a souvenir, which is sometimes coumarin-based rather than true vanilla.
- Flouring the fruitRolling the raisins, currants and citron in flour taken from the measured total, not in addition to it, is what keeps them suspended in the loaf. Add them just before folding in the beaten whites so the batter is not deflated by stirring.
- "Mix like feather cake"The book assumes the method is known from elsewhere in the volume. The usual feather cake method is: cream butter and sugar, add yolks, then alternate flour and milk, and fold in the stiffly beaten whites last.
- Pans and yieldEach of the plain cakes fits an 8-inch square or a 9-inch round and gives roughly nine servings. The wedding cake suits a standard 9x5 loaf tin; it is a plain spiced fruit loaf, not a tiered cake, finished with a plain white icing as the recipe directs.
This page comes from a baking-powder advertiser's recipe section, and the branding shows: Calumet is named in two of the three recipes but silently dropped from the second, and the vanilla is named by proprietor as well. Calumet, founded in Chicago in the 1880s, was one of the new phosphate-and-alum powders that fought a long commercial war with the cream-of-tartar brands around the turn of the century, and free recipe booklets seeded with the brand name were one of their standard tools. The recipes themselves are honest household work: "nursery cake" is the plainest of the three, made with water instead of milk, while the "plain wedding cake" is a spiced fruit loaf under white icing rather than anything like a modern layered wedding cake.