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Fairy Loaf
4 eggs 1¼ C sugar ¾ C butter 1/2 C sweet milk 2½ C Swansdown flour 1 t cream tartar 12 t soda Flavoring Sift flour and add soda; sift together 3 times. Cream butter and sugar, then add well-beaten yolks. Partly beat whites, add cream of tartar. To the butter mixture add the milk, whites, flour, flavoring and stir hard. Bake in slow oven 30 to 50 minutes. Use boiled or butter frosting.
Mrs. Geo. Ives.
A family OYAL heritage -
A plain butter cake despite its place among the breads, leavened with the old soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing rather than baking powder. Several of the quantities as printed do not read cleanly, so treat the proportions with care before committing eggs to a bowl.
- The doubtful measurementsSugar, butter and soda are printed as "14 C", "34 C" and "12 t", which are not workable amounts as they stand; they look like fractions whose glyphs have dropped out. The butter is almost certainly ¾ cup and the soda ½ teaspoon; the sugar could be either 1¼ or 1½ cups. The numbers cannot be recovered with certainty, so proportion with care.
- Swansdown flourSwans Down is a soft bleached cake flour, still sold and still the right choice. If you substitute all-purpose, remove 2 tablespoons per cup and sift as directed, or the crumb will lose the fineness the name promises.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk. Do not substitute buttermilk: the acid balance of the soda and cream of tartar is already set.
- Why the cream of tartar goes into the whitesIt does double duty, stabilising the partly beaten whites and supplying the acid that activates the soda. Beat the whites only to soft, foamy peaks as instructed; stiff whites will not fold into a creamed batter that is then "stirred hard."
- Slow ovenA slow oven is usually given as somewhere between 300F and 325F, which is on the low side for a butter cake of this size and will give a pale, slow-rising result. The upper end, around 325F, is the safer choice; check at 30 minutes.
- The baking timeThirty to fifty minutes is a wide range because the pan is not specified. Shallow layers will sit at the short end of that range and a single deep tube or 9x13 pan at the long end. Test with a skewer at the centre.
- FlavoringLeft open deliberately, as was usual. A teaspoon of vanilla is the default; almond, lemon or rosewater were all common in this period and suit the white crumb.
- Frosting"Boiled frosting" is the poured-syrup meringue icing, beaten hot sugar syrup into egg whites; butter frosting is creamed butter and confectioners' sugar. The first sets to a matte shell, the second stays soft.
Fairy cakes and fairy loaves appear all through American community cookbooks of the early twentieth century, the name signalling lightness and a pale, fine crumb rather than any particular formula. The branded flour gives a rough indication of period: Swans Down cake flour is generally said to have been on the market and advertised to home bakers from the 1890s onward, and its appearance by brand name in a contributed recipe is typical of such collections. Mrs. Geo. Ives is named in the old style by her husband's name, abbreviated. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening is a slightly older habit than ready-mixed baking powder, and persisted in community recipes well after tinned powder was available.