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Prune Cake (C sugar C butter eggs C)
1 C sugar 1/2 C butter 2 eggs 1 C chopped prunes yt cloves 8'T sour milk 1 t cinnamon C flour 1 t soda in flour Beat egg whites and fold in last with the prunes. 1. C sugar 2 eggs ½ C shortening 1/2 C milk 2 C flour 1 t soda and
This page has come through transcription badly: the flour quantity is missing, several measures are corrupted, and a second, unrelated batter has run onto the end. It is workable, but only if you treat the ambiguous figures as ambiguous.
- The missing flourThe line reads "C flour" with no number. A cake built on 1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup butter and 2 eggs conventionally takes about 2 cups of flour, which is also what the fragment below it specifies. The original does not say, so this is inference rather than transcription.
- Corrupted measures"yt cloves" is almost certainly a fraction of a teaspoon of ground cloves, and "8'T sour milk" is a garbled liquid measure — plausibly 1/2 cup, again matching the fragment. Neither can be recovered with certainty from the page as printed.
- The trailing fragmentEverything from the second "1 C sugar" onward belongs to a different recipe that was set in the wrong place: sugar, eggs, shortening, milk, flour and soda, cut off mid-sentence. Ignore it when making the prune cake, or use it only as a cross-check on the quantities above.
- Sour milkPeriod sour milk was raw milk left to clabber, not today's pasteurized milk gone off. Use buttermilk, or add a teaspoon of vinegar or lemon juice to a half cup of milk and let it stand ten minutes. It is there to react with the soda, so an acid liquid is not optional.
- Soda in the flourThe instruction to put the teaspoon of soda "in flour" matters: sifted through the dry ingredients it distributes evenly, whereas dumped into the sour milk it spends its lift before the batter reaches the pan. There is no baking powder here, so the soda and the acid milk are the entire leavening.
- The prunesDried prunes of this era were often stewed and pitted before chopping. Modern pitted prunes are soft enough to chop straight from the bag; if they are dry and leathery, cover with hot water for ten minutes and drain well so the batter does not go wet.
- Folding the whitesBeat the yolks into the creamed butter and sugar, and reserve the whites to whip and fold in at the end with the fruit. Fold rather than stir, and get the batter into the pan promptly — with soda-and-acid leavening there is no second rise waiting.
- Pan and ovenNo temperature or tin is given. A batter this size fills an 8-inch square or a single 8-inch round; bake at about 350F, roughly 30 to 40 minutes until a tester comes out clean. Yield is about nine squares.
Prune cake belongs to the long American tradition of dried-fruit baking, when prunes, raisins and currants were the fruit a household could count on in February. A plain sour-milk batter with a cup of chopped fruit sat closer to a loaf for the coffee table than to a frosted layer cake. The sour-milk-and-soda method that raises it was common in home baking from the mid-nineteenth century onward, a use for milk that had turned in a kitchen without refrigeration, and it persisted in community cookbooks well after commercial baking powder was available.