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Apple Cake
Apples, cored and sliced. 1 oz. (1 heaping tablespoonful) butter, 3 eggs. 1 teaspoonful lemon extract. 4 ozs. (4 heaping tablespoonfuls) sugar 1/2 lb. (2 cups) flour 1/4 teaspoonful salt 2 heaping teaspoonfuls baking powder 1/2 pint (I cup) milk Separate the yolks from the whites of the eggs, add to the yolks the melted butter, milk, salt, and sifted flour. Beat till smooth, then add the baking 1/2 pint (1 cup) milk.
The text as printed is incomplete: the ingredient list breaks off, the method stops mid-sentence, and the apples that give the cake its name never appear. Treat this as a fragment to read rather than a formula to follow, and fill the gaps from a modern plain-cake recipe.
- What is missingThe list gives sugar, flour, salt, baking powder and milk only. The method calls for eggs and melted butter that were never quantified, and the whites are separated for folding in but the page ends before that step. No apples are specified at all — quantity, variety, or whether they are sliced into the batter or laid on top.
- The weights that survive4 oz sugar is about 1/2 cup by modern level measure; the book's 4 heaping tablespoons is not far off, since heaping spoons hold considerably more than level ones. 1/2 lb flour is about 2 cups of the soft, unbleached flour of the period — modern all-purpose measures slightly heavier, so weigh it at 225 g. 1/2 pint is 1 cup.
- Baking powderTwo heaping teaspoons to 2 cups of flour is at or a little above current practice, where about 1 teaspoon per cup is standard. Period baking powders were generally single-acting rather than the double-acting powders of today; a modern powder at that rate may give a coarse crumb and a faintly metallic edge.
- Separated eggsThe page breaks off before the whites are dealt with, but the evident intention is to beat and fold them in at the end, which would carry the cake in the absence of creamed butter. Fold them in two additions after the baking powder, and get the batter into the dish immediately — chemical leavening plus whipped whites both start losing lift at once.
- "Casserole" hereThe fragment does not itself mention a casserole, though the book is devoted to them: a lidded fireproof earthenware dish used on the range as well as in the oven. For a cake it functions as a deep baking dish; bake uncovered, and butter and flour it well, since glazed earthenware sticks harder than tin.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A plain milk-and-egg cake of this size wants a moderate oven, 350F, for roughly 40 to 50 minutes in a deep dish — longer than a shallow tin, and the centre should test clean.
- ApplesFor a cake of this size, about 1 lb of firm cooking apples, peeled and sliced thin, pressed into the top of the batter and dusted with sugar, is a reasonable reconstruction. Softer dessert apples collapse into the crumb.
- YieldEnough for a 2-quart casserole or an 8-inch square dish, serving eight.
Marion Harris Neil's casserole book belongs to a brief, intense vogue in the years before the First World War for cooking and serving in the same fireproof vessel — a fashion often linked to the arrival of affordable heat-resistant earthenware in American kitchens, with borosilicate glass ovenware following later. Publishers put out whole volumes devoted to the dish rather than to a cuisine, and the recipes stretch well past stews into puddings, breads and cakes, as here. An apple cake of this kind is a plain milk-and-egg batter of the sort that filled every household manual of the period, distinguished only by the fruit and the dish it is baked in; separating the eggs and folding the beaten whites back in was one of several ways of lightening such a batter, alongside the baking powder already well established by this date. The page has been transmitted incomplete, which is common in scanned cookery texts.