Home › Breads, Rolls, Muffins, Etc. › Cherry Cake
Cherry Cake
2 C flour 1/2 C butter 1 C sugar 3 eggs 3 T sour milk 1 C fresh cherries ¼ C cherry juice 1 C butter 2 C sugar ½ C milk 1 t baking soda 1 t baking powder 1/2 t cinnamon, allspice and cloves
This is an ingredient list rather than a method, and it has been mangled somewhere between the typewriter and the page. Read it as a starting point for a spiced sour-milk butter cake and expect to supply your own judgement.
- The fractionsThe printed page was checked: the recipe calls for 1/4 cup cherry juice and 1/2 cup milk, as our text now gives.
- The duplicated linesButter and sugar each appear twice (1/2 C and 1 C butter, 1 C and 2 C sugar). Two sets of quantities have been run together at some point in copying; there is no way to tell from the page whether the second set belongs to a larger cake, to a filling or topping, or to an unrelated recipe. The smaller amounts -- 1/2 cup butter and 1 cup sugar -- are the ones that make sense against 2 cups flour and three eggs.
- No method at allNothing here tells you what to do. Standard creaming order applies: butter and sugar beaten pale, eggs one at a time, dry ingredients and liquid added alternately, cherries folded in last.
- Sour milkThis means milk left to sour naturally, thick and acidic. Buttermilk is the direct substitute; failing that, sour fresh milk with lemon juice or vinegar in proportion -- about a teaspoon of acid to a scant quarter cup of milk -- and leave it ten minutes. Three tablespoons is a small amount of liquid, and the cherry juice adds more.
- Soda and powder togetherThe teaspoon of baking soda needs the acid from the sour milk and cherry juice to work. Both leaveners at a teaspoon each is a lot for two cups of flour, and reducing the soda to about three-quarters of a teaspoon would be safer; the batter should go into the oven promptly once mixed.
- The cherriesPit them, halve them if large, and toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding in, or they sink. The recipe does not say whether sweet or sour cherries were meant.
- Spices"1/2 t cinnamon, allspice and cloves" most likely means half a teaspoon of each, though it could as easily mean half a teaspoon shared between them. Cloves at the full half-teaspoon are assertive; a quarter teaspoon is plenty if you prefer them in the background.
- Oven and panThe page gives neither. For a butter cake of this size, try a moderate oven, around 350F, in a greased 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan, 35 to 45 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean. It should give 8 to 10 servings.
The copying of recipes from handwritten cards introduces exactly the sort of damage visible here: lost fraction bars, merged lines, vanished instructions. Contributors to books of this kind were not writing for strangers -- a cake with butter, sugar, eggs, flour and sour milk was assumed to be creamed, and the oven was judged by hand rather than by dial, so the card recorded only what varied from household to household. Sour milk itself is the period marker: before pasteurised, refrigerated milk became universal, kitchens had milk turning on the shelf, and a whole family of cakes and quick breads existed to use it up while its acid did the work of activating saleratus.