Orange Cakes
1 quart of flour. 1 teacup of butter. 4 eggs. 1 tablespoonful of yeast. Make into a stiff batter with milk, the over-night. Next morning, add a teacup of Indian meal. Beat well and put in cups to rise before baking.--Mrs. A. C.
A yeast-raised breakfast cake, mixed as a stiff batter the night before and finished with cornmeal in the morning. The recipe assumes a cook who knows what a risen batter should look like, so the useful work here is in the measurements and the bake.
- The overnight sponge is the whole recipeFlour, butter, eggs and milk are beaten to a stiff batter and left to ferment; the cornmeal goes in only the next morning, then the batter rises a second time in the cups. Skip either rise and you get a dense corn muffin rather than the light, slightly sour cake intended.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume: roughly 4 cups, about 1 lb (450-500 g). Sift or spoon it in loosely rather than scooping, since a packed quart will make the batter unworkably stiff.
- Teacup and tablespoonfulA teacup in period American recipes is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though usage varies and some sources treat it as a full cup. Taking 3/4 cup, the butter is roughly 6 oz (170 g) and the cornmeal about 3/4 cup. The tablespoon of yeast means the soft baker's, brewer's or homemade yeast of the period, which was considerably weaker than modern dry yeast; about 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry, or one packet, is a workable modern substitute rather than a direct equivalent.
- Indian mealCornmeal. Fine white or yellow meal both work; stone-ground gives more flavour but drinks up more liquid, so expect to loosen the batter slightly with milk.
- "Make into a stiff batter with milk, the over-night"A printer's slip for something like "set it over-night." The milk quantity is genuinely unstated, which is normal for the period: add it gradually until the batter drops thickly from the spoon but does not pour, probably 1 to 1 1/2 cups.
- Where to leave itA nineteenth-century kitchen was cool overnight. In a warm modern room the batter can over-ferment and turn sharply sour by morning; a cool spot or the refrigerator, brought back to room temperature before the cornmeal goes in, gives a better result.
- The cups and the ovenButtered muffin tins or ovenproof teacups, filled about two-thirds and left to rise until visibly puffed. Bake at 400F until risen and browned, roughly 20-25 minutes for muffin-sized cakes.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 muffin-sized cakes. They are at their best warm from the oven and go stale quickly, as most yeast-raised batter breads do.
There is no orange in these cakes, and the name is unexplained: it may refer to shape and colour rather than fruit -- small round cakes, baked in cups and tinted gold by the cornmeal -- or it may simply be a title that does not match the recipe. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials like "Mrs. A. C.", is full of these overnight yeast batters -- the same family as batter bread, waffles and muffins raised with a sponge instead of soda. Chemical leavening was widely available by the 1870s, but yeast persists throughout this book, and a household that already kept a yeast pot going for bread lost nothing by borrowing a spoonful for cakes. The addition of cornmeal to a wheat batter is characteristically Southern, and the proportion here -- a teacup of meal to a quart of flour -- shows it used for texture and colour rather than as the backbone of the bread.