Butter Cake
1 1/2 cups flour. 1 cup butter. 5 eggs. 1½ cups powdered sugar 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon vanilla Beat the butter and flour to a cream; add the yolks, then the beaten whites, and last the sugar, baking powder and vanilla.
The text as printed has lost most of its ingredient column — butter, flour and eggs are all called for in the method but never quantified — so this is a set of directions rather than a complete formula. What survives still tells you a good deal about how a plain butter cake was built around 1900.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the sugar, baking powder and vanilla have amounts. A standard butter cake of this era in the same proportion would run roughly 1/2 cup butter, 2 cups flour, 3 eggs and about 1/2 cup milk, but the original does not say so and none of that should be treated as the author's intent.
- "Powdered sugar"In American books of this period powdered sugar usually means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Ordinary granulated sugar is the closer substitute.
- Butter and flour creamed togetherThe fat goes in with the flour rather than with the sugar. Coating the flour in fat before liquid is added tends to limit gluten development, which would give a shorter, more tender crumb; the text gives no reason for the order. Do not reflexively swap in the modern butter-and-sugar creaming order.
- Separated eggsYolks go in with the fat and flour, the whites are beaten separately and added before the sugar. With the egg and flour quantities missing it is impossible to say how the work is divided between the beaten whites and the teaspoon of baking powder, though both clearly contribute. Fold, do not stir.
- Sugar lastAdding sugar after the beaten whites is contrary to modern practice and will deflate some of the foam. If you work it, add the sugar in two or three additions and fold with a light hand.
- OvenNo temperature or time is given anywhere in the surviving text. If you bake it using the conjectural quantities above, 350°F is a reasonable modern default: roughly 30 to 40 minutes for two 8-inch layers, longer in a loaf or tube pan.
- YieldNothing in the text indicates a yield. Using the conjectural quantities suggested above, you would get a two-layer 8-inch cake or one 9x5 loaf, serving eight to ten.
Mrs. Fryer's book was issued in loose-leaf form so a cook could add, remove and reorder pages in her own binder — a format often said to have had a brief vogue in early twentieth-century American cookery publishing. "Butter cake" is generally taken to have been the workhorse name for the plain creamed cake that sat between the eggy pound cake and the leavened, milk-slackened layer cakes that chemical baking powder made routine after the 1860s. The separated-egg method here is usually read as a holdover from the era before reliable powders, when beaten whites did most of the lifting; the single teaspoon of baking powder is the newer technology grafted onto an older technique, and cookbooks of this generation are full of such hybrids.