Cup Cake
5 cupfuls of flour. 3 cupfuls of sugar. 1 1/2 cupfuls of butter. As much fruit as you like. 1 teaspoonful of soda dissolved in a cupful of milk. 3 eggs. 1 nutmeg. 1 wine-glass wine and brandy mixed. Mix as pound cake.--Mrs. J. W. H. Cup Cake. 1 cupful of butter. 2 cupfuls of sugar. 2 1/2 cupfuls of flour. 1/2 cupful of milk. 5 eggs, beaten separately. 1 teaspoonful yeast powder.--Miss M. W. A Nice Cup Cake. 6 eggs. 4 cupfuls of flour. 3 cupfuls of sugar. 1 cupful of butter. 1 cupful of milk. 1 teaspoonful cream of tartar. 1/2 teaspoonful of soda. Season with mace and nutmeg. Bake in cups or little tin pans.--Mrs. Wm. C. R.
Three versions of the same idea, printed in sequence: a cake measured in cupfuls rather than weighed. None gives a temperature, a pan size or a time, so the method has to be reconstructed from the proportions.
- "Mix as pound cake"This is the hinge of the first recipe. Cream the butter and sugar until pale and light, beat in the eggs, then add the flour alternately with the milk. The lift in all three cakes is largely mechanical, so under-creaming gives a dense, greasy crumb no amount of soda will fix.
- Yeast powderIn the second recipe this means baking powder, not yeast. One teaspoon for 2 1/2 cups of flour is on the light side by modern standards; the five separately beaten eggs are doing most of the work, so fold the whites in last and do not deflate them.
- Soda and cream of tartarThe third recipe is baking powder assembled from its parts: 1/2 teaspoon soda to 1 teaspoon cream of tartar is roughly the classic 1:2 ratio. In the first recipe the soda has only sweet milk and a little wine to react with, so expect a modest rise and a slightly soapy note if you increase it.
- A wine-glassIn nineteenth-century American receipts a wine-glass is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. "Wine and brandy mixed" is unspecified; a fortified wine such as sherry or Madeira with brandy is a plausible reading, not a certain one.
- One nutmegA whole grated nutmeg is roughly 2 to 3 teaspoons, which is assertive in a five-cup-of-flour cake but not absurd for the period. Start with a teaspoon if you want the butter to show through.
- "As much fruit as you like"Dried currants, raisins and candied peel are meant, not fresh fruit. Toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in, or they will settle on the bottom.
- Oven and pansNo temperature or time is given; a moderate oven of around 350F is a reasonable modern reconstruction. The third recipe's "cups or little tin pans" will fill something on the order of three dozen small tins, baking perhaps 20 to 25 minutes; baked as one large loaf or tube cake, the first recipe will need considerably longer, and can be tented with foil once the top colours.
- EggsPeriod eggs ran smaller than today's large. If a batter looks slack, hold back the last egg rather than adding flour.
"Cup cake" originally described the method of measuring, not the shape: ingredients scooped by the cupful instead of weighed on scales, in contrast to pound cake, where each element was taken by the pound. Formulas of this kind, with the principal ingredients set out in fixed cup proportions, were the workhorse of American home baking through the nineteenth century, easy to remember and easy to scale in a kitchen that might own no balance at all. That the same volume-based habit later attached itself to the small cakes baked in individual tins is generally taken as the source of the modern word, though the two senses ran alongside each other for decades; Mrs. Wm. C. R. covers both by simply saying "bake in cups or little tin pans." Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials, which is why three near-identical cakes sit one after another, each credited to a different contributor and each slightly different in the hand.