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Ruggles' Cake
6 eggs. 1½ cupful butter. 3 cupfuls sugar. 4 cupfuls flour. 1 cupful milk. 1 teaspoonful soda. Season to taste.--Mrs. R.
A list of proportions rather than a method, in the shorthand Virginia housekeepers used when the technique was assumed. It is a large butter cake — closer to a pound cake than a modern layer cake — and it wants a slow-to-moderate oven and a long bake.
- The missing methodCream the butter and sugar until pale, beat in the eggs, then add the flour and milk alternately and the soda last, dissolved in a spoonful of the milk. Nothing in the ingredient list is out of the ordinary; the whole difficulty is that the mixing order was left unwritten.
- Soda without acidA teaspoon of soda in a cake with sweet milk has little to react with and may leave a faint soapy, metallic taste. Some period recipes assumed sour milk or buttermilk, which supplies the acid, though books of the day usually wrote "sour milk" when that was meant; use buttermilk, or replace the soda with about a tablespoon of baking powder.
- Cup sizesNineteenth-century cups ran near the modern 8 fl oz, but flour was scooped and unsifted. Weigh instead: 4 cupfuls flour is roughly 1 lb 1 oz (480 g), 3 cupfuls sugar about 1 lb 5 oz (600 g), 1½ cupfuls butter 12 oz (340 g).
- "Season to taste"Standard period phrasing for flavouring, not salt. Grated nutmeg, mace, lemon zest, rosewater or a spoonful of brandy were the usual choices; a teaspoon of vanilla and half a teaspoon of salt suit modern palates.
- OvenNo temperature is given; oven thermometers existed but were rare in home kitchens, and heat was judged by hand. Bake at 325F in a tube pan or two loaf pans, 60 to 80 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean. A hotter oven risks setting the crust before this much batter cooks through.
- YieldThe batter runs to about 4 lb — one 10-inch tube pan, or two 9x5 loaves. It keeps well wrapped for several days and improves on the second day.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, and terse initials — "Mrs. R." — are among the signatures the book uses, alongside fuller names. Cakes named for a family or a neighbour appear in its cookery section: the name records whose kitchen the proportions came from rather than anything about the dish, and "Ruggles" is almost certainly a surname of that kind rather than a place or ingredient. The recipe's form is characteristic of household manuscript cookery, which circulated as ratios among cooks who already knew how to cream butter and judge a wood-fired oven by hand; the printed cookbooks of the period simply set those ratios in type without filling in what everyone was assumed to know.