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Banana Cake (C granulated sugar C butter)
1½ C granulated sugar ⅔ C butter 2 eggs 4 T sour milk and 1 level t soda 1 C mashed bananas 1 C nutmeats 1 t vanilla 1⅔C Swansdown flour To the creamed sugar and butter add other ingredients. Mix well and bake in square pan, slowly. 1 C dates, cut fine 1 C hot water 1 t soda
This is a community-cookbook shorthand recipe, and the typesetting has not survived intact. Two of the quantities are corrupted and one trailing ingredient list appears to belong to a different cake entirely; read the notes before you start creaming anything.
- The butter figure is wrong"3 C butter" against 1½ cups sugar and 2 eggs is not a cake batter, it is a puddle. Something between ⅓ and ¾ cup is the plausible range for a cake of this size; ½ cup is a reasonable working choice. Treat the printed figure as a typo rather than a period quirk.
- The flour figure is unreadable"12C" is a mangled fraction, most likely 1½ or 2½ cups. With about ½ cup butter, 1½ cups sugar, 2 eggs and a cup of mashed banana, roughly 2 to 2½ cups of cake flour will behave. The original is genuinely ambiguous here.
- The dates at the end"1 C dates, cut fine / 1 C hot water / 1 t soda" is the standard opening of a date cake or date bread — dates are steeped in hot water with soda to soften them. It has no place in a banana cake and is almost certainly the head of the next recipe, printed without a break.
- Swansdown flourSwans Down was and still is a bleached soft-wheat cake flour, lighter in protein than all-purpose. If you substitute all-purpose, remove 2 tablespoons per cup and sift twice.
- Sour milk and sodaFour tablespoons of genuinely soured milk supplied the acid to activate the teaspoon of soda. Buttermilk is the direct modern stand-in; ordinary milk soured with a few drops of lemon juice also works. The mashed banana supplies most of the batter's moisture, which is why so little liquid is called for.
- "Bake slowly"A slow oven in this period is usually rendered as somewhere around 275–325°F; sources vary. Fruit-and-nut batters scorch at the edges before the center sets, which is why the direction is there. The recipe specifies only a square pan; in an 8-inch square, reckon on roughly 40–50 minutes and test with a straw or skewer.
- NutmeatsSimply shelled nuts, chopped. Walnuts or hickory nuts are the likely intention; pecans work as well.
- YieldOne square pan, cut into 9 or 12 squares. It keeps well for two or three days wrapped.
Banana cake belongs to a specific moment in American home baking: bananas became cheap and reliably available in the Midwest only after refrigerated rail transport and the big importing fleets of the 1890s and 1900s, and by the 1910s and 1920s church and club cookbooks are full of ways to use the ones that had gone soft. Mashed overripe banana behaves like applesauce in a batter — it adds moisture, sugar and acid — so the recipe follows the sour-milk-and-soda pattern that Midwestern cooks already knew from spice cake and jam cake. The brand name in the ingredient list is telling too: Swans Down cake flour was marketed hard to exactly this audience.