Drop Cake
6 eggs. 1 pound sugar. 3/4 pound butter. 1 teaspoonful soda, in 1 cupful sour cream. 2 teaspoonfuls cream of tartar, in 1 quart flour. --Mrs. S.
This is a formula rather than a method — the contributor assumed any cook would know what to do with it. Here is what the proportions mean in modern terms.
- No method is givenNo method is given. A cook of the period would most likely have creamed the butter and sugar, added the eggs, then alternated the soured cream carrying the soda with the flour carrying the cream of tartar, dropping the batter in spoonfuls on tins to bake.
- "Drop cake" means a small cakeThese are dropped from a spoon onto a tin, not baked in a loaf or layer pan. The result is closer to a soft cookie or a rock cake than to what we now call cake.
- Weights to volumeOne pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; 3/4 pound of butter is three sticks. A quart of flour, measured as flour was then — dipped and unsifted — runs 4 to 4 1/2 cups, roughly 1 1/4 pounds.
- The double leaveningSoda in the sour cream reacts with the cream's acid; the cream of tartar in the flour is a second acid to lift the rest. Sift the cream of tartar through the flour thoroughly so it is evenly distributed.
- Sour cream then and nowIn this period sour cream generally meant cream left to sour naturally, often thinner and less consistently acidic than the thick cultured product sold today. Buttermilk, or cultured sour cream thinned a little, is a reasonable substitute.
- OvenThe original gives no oven instruction. Small dropped cakes of this richness suit a moderately hot oven, around 375F, for 10 to 14 minutes, until the edges color. The cook would have judged the heat of her own range by eye and hand.
- ScaleSix eggs, a pound of sugar and a quart of flour make five or six dozen small cakes — a household batch for a large table. Halving the recipe works without adjustment.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878, with later printings), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by cooks from Virginia and her sister states, which is why so many of its entries are signed only with an initial and read like notes passed between neighbors rather than instructions for a stranger. "Drop cakes" of this kind — dropped in spoonfuls onto tins — belong to the long American transition from small cakes to what would later simply be called cookies. The leavening is characteristic of the moment: soda slaked in soured dairy was the older Southern habit, while cream of tartar let a cook boost the rise without waiting on milk to turn. Commercial baking powder combined the two in one tin, though soda-and-soured-dairy recipes persisted well into the twentieth century.