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Graham Cracker Cake (C butter C sugar eggs beaten)
1 1/2 C graham crackers, rolled fine. 1/2 C butter 1 C sugar 3 eggs, beaten separately ¾ C sweet milk 1/2 C flour 1½ t baking powder Whites added last Cream butter and sugar, add beaten yolks and other ingredients folding in stiffly beaten whites last. Bake in two layers. 1/2 C melted butter 2 C powdered sugar Filling: 1 t vanilla Cream enough to make smooth Sprinkle powdered sugar over top of cake.
Mabel Andrews.
Note:-Mrs. Eleanor Suydam uses 25 graham crackers and omits the ½ C flour and adds 1/2 C walnut meats
A plain layer cake with a butter-and-powdered-sugar filling, given here in the compressed shorthand church cookbooks favored, with a second contributor's graham-cracker version tacked on at the end.
- Read the two versions separatelyThe main formula is an ordinary butter layer cake. Mrs. Suydam's note is what makes it a graham cracker cake: replace the flour with 25 crushed graham crackers and add 1/2 cup chopped walnuts. Follow one or the other, not both.
- The flour quantity is unreliableA creamed cake built on 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup sugar and 3 eggs needs roughly 1 1/2 cups flour; the half cup as printed will not carry the batter. Treat the figure as unsettled and use judgment, or make the cracker version, where the crackers do the work.
- MilkThe milk measure has lost its fraction. Three-quarters of a cup is the usual amount for a cake of this size. "Sweet milk" simply means fresh whole milk, as distinct from the soured milk used with soda.
- Graham crackersIt is not clear whether "25 graham crackers" means 25 full sheets or 25 of the scored halves; the smaller reading gives roughly 2 cups of crumbs, the larger closer to 3, so start with about 2 cups and add until the batter holds. Roll them or pulse them fine; coarse crumbs give a gritty, damp crumb. Present-day graham crackers may well be sweeter than those the contributor bought, so the cake may come out sweeter than intended.
- Baking powder with crumbsCracker crumbs are already baked and will not develop gluten structure the way flour does, so the 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder plus the stiffly beaten whites are effectively the only lift. Fold the whites in gently and get the pans into the oven promptly.
- Oven and pansThe recipe gives no pan size, temperature or time, only "Bake in two layers." Two greased 8-inch layers at a moderate oven, about 350F, is a reasonable modern reading; check the flour version from about 25 minutes and the cracker version earlier, as the sugar in the crackers is likely to brown it faster.
- The fillingHalf a cup of melted butter to 2 cups of powdered sugar is a thin, quick icing rather than a buttercream; add cream a spoonful at a time and let it cool and thicken before spreading, or it will run off the layer.
- YieldIf baked as two 8-inch layers, one two-layer cake, 8 to 10 servings.
Graham crackers take their name from Sylvester Graham, the 1830s temperance preacher and dietary reformer who campaigned for coarse unsifted wheat flour; by the time cookbooks like this one were being compiled the cracker was a commercial product with little connection to his austere program. Cakes built on crushed crackers or crumbs instead of flour appear in American community cookbooks in the early twentieth century. The double attribution here -- one woman submits a cake, another notes how she makes it differently, and both are printed -- is characteristic of subscription and community collections.