Velvet Cake
Half a pound of butter, one pound sugar; creamed together. One teacup of cold water, with a level teaspoonful of soda dissolved in it, and poured in the butter and sugar, two teaspoonfuls cream of tartar, sifted in one pound of flour.
Mix the flour with butter, sugar, and water, and beat well. Take five eggs, beat yolks and whites separately, and then beat them together three minutes. Season as you like, and mix with the batter. Beat considerably and bake half an hour.--Mrs. A.B.
A large butter cake built on the old pound-cake proportions, leavened with a hand-mixed soda and cream of tartar pair rather than commercial baking powder. The whole thing scales down neatly by half if you do not want a cake this size.
- Work fast once the soda is inSoda dissolved in water and cream of tartar sifted into flour begin reacting the moment they meet, and unlike modern double-acting baking powder they give only one lift. Have the pans greased and the oven hot before you combine, and get the batter in without delay.
- The weights in cupsHalf a pound of butter is 2 sticks (225 g), a pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups, and a pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups depending on how it is measured. Weighing is more reliable here than scooping.
- A teacupIn nineteenth-century American books a teacup is usually taken as smaller than a coffee cup, and is commonly glossed at about 3/4 cup, though the measure varied from book to book. Use roughly that much for the soda water.
- The leavening ratioOne teaspoon soda to two teaspoons cream of tartar is the standard homemade baking powder of the period and is chemically sound; you can substitute about 3 teaspoons of modern baking powder sifted into the flour, omitting both.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the cook was expected to judge her range. Bake at 350F.
- Half an hour is for layersHalf an hour suits shallow pans -- the recipe names no pan, but this quantity of batter is unlikely to bake through in thirty minutes in one deep cake. Divide it between layer pans or two loaf pans; loaves will want closer to 50-60 minutes, tested with a skewer.
- "Season as you like"Flavoring, not salt. A tablespoon of vanilla, the grated rind of a lemon, or a teaspoon of grated nutmeg all belong to the period. Add a teaspoon of salt if you are using unsalted butter, since the original probably assumed salted.
- YieldA large cake: two loaf pans, or three 9-inch layers rather than two, roughly 20 servings. The eggs are beaten separately for volume, though the original directs beating them together and beating the batter "considerably".
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is full of cakes credited only to initials like this one — a reminder that the book was an aggregation of household manuscripts rather than a single author's work. "Velvet cake" belongs to a family of descriptive cake names of the era, alongside silver, gold, sunshine and feather cakes, though names such as silver and gold referred to the use of whites or yolks rather than to texture. The recipe's real interest is the leavening: commercial baking powder was on the market by the 1870s but was not universally trusted, and many cooks mixed their own from bicarbonate of soda and cream of tartar, a byproduct of winemaking sold at the druggist. The two-to-one proportion given here is close to proportions printed in period household guides.