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Banana Cake (C white sugar C flour C butter)
1½ C white sugar 2 C flour 1/2 C butter 2 bananas 1 t soda 1 C sour milk 2 eggs Mrs. F. J. Wright. 1 t baking powder 1 t vanilla Beat sugar and butter together, add well beaten eggs, bananas sliced thin. Sift soda and baking powder with flour; add sour milk and flour alternately. Add vanilla last. Bake in two layers and put together with any desired frosting. This cake remains fresh for a week. Jessie Ray.
A plain two-layer butter cake leavened with sour milk and soda, from a church collection that abbreviates ruthlessly. Nothing here is difficult, but the book gives no oven temperature, no pan size and no baking time.
- The abbreviationsC is a cup, t is a teaspoon. Half a cup of butter is one standard stick (4 oz); 2 cups of flour is roughly 250 g of all-purpose.
- Sour milkUsually naturally soured raw milk; modern pasteurized milk tends to spoil rather than clabber, so do not try to sour it on the counter. Use buttermilk cup for cup, or stir 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar into a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. The acid is what reacts with the soda.
- Both soda and baking powderNot a redundancy. The soda neutralizes the acid in the sour milk and the baking powder supplies the remaining lift. Keep both, and do not increase the soda or the crumb will taste soapy and darken.
- Bananas sliced thinThe recipe slices rather than mashes, and adds the slices early, with the beaten eggs. Use bananas that are ripe and speckled but still sliceable, not black.
- Oven and timeAssume a moderate oven, 350F. Two 8- or 9-inch round layers will take 25 to 30 minutes; the cake is done when the center springs back and a tester comes out clean.
- Mixing orderThe recipe directs the milk and flour be added alternately; modern practice is to begin and end with flour. Stop as soon as the last flour disappears.
- Yield and frostingOne 8-inch two-layer cake, 10 to 12 slices. 'Any desired frosting' is left open; boiled white icing and confectioners' sugar and butter frostings were both current at the time. Cream cheese frosting is a later habit but suits the fruit.
- The keeping claimA week of freshness is plausible for a high-sugar, high-moisture banana cake kept covered at room temperature. Refrigeration will stale the crumb faster, so keep it in a tin unless the frosting requires cold.
Bananas reached American inland towns in quantity only after the expansion of the refrigerated shipping trade of the 1880s and 1890s, and by the early twentieth century they were cheap enough to turn up in home baking rather than being served whole as a novelty fruit. The sour-milk-and-soda leavening, on the other hand, is the older technique: it belongs to a kitchen that still had milk going sour on its own and treated that as a resource rather than a loss. Two names appear on this entry, Mrs. F. J. Wright and Jessie Ray, which is common in church cookbooks, and the printer kept both.