Peggy Cake
1½ cups sugar 1/2 cup butter 3 eggs 1/2 cup milk 2 cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder Little grated nutmeg Mix like pound cake, adding the baking powder last. Bake in shallow tins or in a Turk's head.
A plain butter cake with the proportions of a lightened pound cake. The original assumes you know the pound-cake method and gives neither temperature nor time, so both need supplying.
- "Mix like pound cake"Cream the softened butter with the sugar until pale and fluffy, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the flour and milk alternately in two or three additions. The baking powder goes in with the last of the flour, as instructed, so it is not activated any longer than necessary.
- Turk's headA fluted, turban-shaped ring mould, closely related to the moulds the modern bundt pan descends from. Any 6-cup ring or bundt tin works; grease and flour it thoroughly, since this batter is lean on fat by bundt standards and will stick in the flutes.
- Oven temperatureUnstated, as was normal. Bake at 350F. Shallow tins take about 25-30 minutes; a ring mould 40-50 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean and the cake pulls slightly from the sides.
- FlourFlour sold for cakes in this period may have been softer than modern all-purpose, though American milling of the era also produced strong, high-protein flours. For a finer crumb, use cake flour, or replace two tablespoons of each cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch.
- Butter and saltThe recipe calls for no salt; butter of the period was usually sold salted, which may be why none is specified. Use salted butter, or add a scant 1/4 teaspoon of salt with the flour.
- Nutmeg"Little grated nutmeg" means roughly 1/4 teaspoon, grated fresh from the whole seed. It is the only flavouring in the cake, so pre-ground jarred nutmeg will read as flat.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 servings from a ring mould, or one 8-inch square pan of shallow cake. It is a keeping cake: close-grained, better on the second day, and good plain with fruit or tea.
Recipes bearing a woman's name — Peggy Cake, Dolly Varden, Lady Baltimore — were the common currency of American community and commercial cookbooks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the person behind the name is almost never recoverable. What is recoverable is the arithmetic: this is the old 1-2-3-4 cake (butter, sugar, flour, eggs), a lighter relative of the pound cake rather than the thing itself, with chemical baking powder standing in for the long hand-beating that a true pound cake required. Cheap, reliable baking powder is generally said to have reached American kitchens in quantity after the 1860s, and it rewrote the whole cake chapter of books like this one, turning an all-morning project into a half-hour batter. The Turk's head mould is the older survival here, a shape used for rich yeasted cakes in central Europe long before it was pressed into service for quick butter cakes.