Orange Cake
1/2 pound butter 1/2 pound sugar 1/2 pound flour 5 eggs Rind of 1 orange Juice of 2 oranges 1 even teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon hot water Mix like pound cake, beating the oranges into the sugar and butter and adding the soda dissolved in hot water last. Bake in a slow oven until thoroughly done.
A pound-cake batter flavoured with orange and lifted slightly by soda reacting with the juice. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, which is the first thing to reckon with.
- The missing sugarThe method says to beat the oranges into "the sugar and butter," but no sugar appears in the list. On the pound-cake proportions implied by the rest of the recipe, sugar would be roughly equal to the butter by volume, about 1 cup, but this is a reconstruction rather than what the book says.
- Mix like pound cakeCream the butter and sugar, beat in the rind and juice as the recipe directs, then the eggs, then the flour. The soda dissolved in hot water goes in last and the cake should go into the oven promptly.
- Why the soda goes in lastSoda meets the acid of two oranges' juice and starts releasing carbon dioxide at once. Any delay between mixing and baking costs you rise, and this cake has no baking powder to fall back on.
- A slow ovenThe book gives no temperature. 'Slow oven' is conventionally read today as roughly 300 to 325F. A batter this rich in butter and egg sets slowly and will brown and crack at the top before the centre is done if pushed higher.
- Pan and timingThe quantities will roughly suit a loaf pan or a small tube pan, though the batter is generous for an 8 by 4 loaf. Timing is a matter of judgement rather than the clock -- test with a skewer in the deepest part, which is what "until thoroughly done" is telling you.
- RindZest only the coloured outer layer. The white pith beneath is bitter and, in a cake this plain, there is nothing to hide it behind.
- Juice volumeTwo oranges yield anywhere from a third of a cup to well over half a cup. Toward the higher end the batter will be slack against only 1 1/2 cups flour; err on the lower side and make up the flavour with extra zest.
- YieldOne loaf, about 10 to 12 slices. It keeps well wrapped for several days and, like most pound cakes, improves on the second day.
Orange cake belongs to the large family of pound cakes, so named for the old English formula of a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs and flour; by the late nineteenth century American cooks are often said to have lightened that ratio and flavoured it with citrus, rose water or spirits. Soda dissolved in hot water was the standard leavening trick in recipes carrying an acid ingredient, and the acid here is the orange juice itself, which is why the recipe insists the two meet only at the last moment. Oranges were shipped north in quantity from Florida and California by the 1890s.