One-Egg Cake
1 cup sugar 1/4 cup butter 1 egg. 1⅔ cups flour 1/2 cup milk 1 teaspoon flavoring 3 teaspoons baking powder Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; add the egg beaten very light, then the milk and flavoring. Sift the flour and baking powder together; add these to the mixture and beat well. Bake about half an hour.
The printed ingredient list has come down to us incomplete — the butter, sugar and the single egg of the title are all named in the method but their quantities are missing from the column. Read the method first and treat the list as partial.
- The missing quantitiesButter, sugar and egg appear in the instructions but not in the ingredient list, and no amount for them survives on the page. Rather than guess, use a one-egg butter cake formula you already trust and take the flour, milk, baking powder and method from here.
- "12/3 cups flour"Read as 1 2/3 cups, the fraction run together in the printed text. Roughly 210 g of soft all-purpose flour.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to 1 2/3 cups of flour is a heavy hand by current standards, closer to two teaspoons in modern double-acting powder. Powders of the period varied in strength and were often weaker than today's.
- "Flavoring"In a book of this vintage this means vanilla, lemon or almond extract, whichever the household kept. One teaspoon of vanilla is the safe default.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A plain butter cake of this size wants a moderate oven, 350F.
- Pan and timingHalf an hour at 350F suits a single 8-inch round or square layer, or a small loaf. Test with a skewer at 25 minutes; the batter is lean in egg and dries quickly past done.
- Creaming"Beat the butter and sugar to a cream" is the hinge. With only one egg there is little structure from protein, so the air worked into the fat is doing most of the lifting.
One-egg cakes fill the cake chapters of American household books from the 1880s through the First World War, sitting in the range between the eggless "poor man's cake" and the four- and six-egg pound cakes. Eggs were seasonal and priced accordingly, and the arrival of reliable commercial baking powder in the second half of the nineteenth century made it practical to build a light cake on chemical leavening with an egg present mainly for flavor, color and a little binding. Mrs. Fryer's book was issued in loose-leaf form so that pages could be added, swapped or replaced in the binder — these sheets lived hard lives on kitchen tables.