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Peanut Cake (T baking powder C sweet milk)
1 t baking powder 1/2 C sweet milk Salted peanuts Add sugar to the beaten egg and beat. Add butter. Sift flour with baking powder and add to the mixture alternately with milk. Beat all briskly and add 1 C salted peanuts. Bake in shallow pan and frost with plain icing. Sprinkle with salted peanuts.
Mrs. R. M. Dillon. 1 C sugar 2 eggs 1/2 C boiled milk
A church-supper loaf cake, printed with its ingredient list broken across the page in a way that leaves two quantities missing. Read the whole thing before you start.
- The ingredient list is incompleteButter and flour are both called for in the method but given no amount anywhere on the page. For a cake built on 1 C sugar and 2 eggs, the period standard would be about 1/2 C butter and 1 1/2 C flour, but that is inference, not what the book says.
- "Sweet milk" and "boiled milk"Sweet milk simply means fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabber that other recipes in these books call for. The fragment also lists "1/2 C boiled milk"; since the page already gives 1/2 C sweet milk, the two entries may be the same half cup set twice rather than a second addition. Boiled or scalded milk, cooled before use, was common when milk was untreated. Ordinary whole milk works.
- Baking powder seems lowOne teaspoon to roughly a cup and a half of flour (and that flour amount is inferred, not given) is on the light side by modern practice, and this batter carries a cup of heavy nuts. Expect a dense, close-grained cake rather than a fluffy one.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given. A shallow pan of this size bakes at 350F for about 25 to 30 minutes, until a tester comes out clean. An 8-inch square pan suits the quantity.
- Salted peanutsUse roasted salted peanuts, rubbed in a towel to shed loose salt and skins, and chop them coarsely. Whole peanuts sink and make the cake hard to cut. The salt is the point of the recipe — it plays against the plain icing.
- Plain icingIn period usage this usually means a confectioners' sugar glaze: about 1 1/2 C sifted powdered sugar with 2 to 3 T milk or water, thin enough to pour, though the term could also cover a boiled sugar icing. Sprinkle the peanuts on while it is still wet or they will not stick.
- YieldAn 8-inch square pan cuts into 9 to 12 squares. This is a cake meant to be cut into bars and carried, not layered.
Salted peanuts entered American home baking around the turn of the twentieth century, as roasted peanuts moved from street-vendor novelty to grocery staple and cooks began treating them the way they had long treated walnuts and hickory nuts. Recipes like this one -- a plain sugar-and-egg cake with a cup of nuts stirred in and a sugar glaze on top -- are the backbone of community cookbooks: cheap, sturdy, easy to multiply, and designed to travel to a supper or bake sale without collapsing. The garbled ingredient list is itself typical of the genre, in which columns of quantities frequently drifted away from the paragraph of instructions they belonged to.