Plain Cake
1/4 cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 1/2 cup milk 1½ cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; add the beaten yolks and beat all well; then add the milk alternately with the sifted flour and baking powder; last of all add the whites, beaten to a stiff froth, and the flavoring. Bake in one pan or in small gem pans. 1/4 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 egg
A basic creamed-butter layer cake with the whites folded in separately. The original gives no oven temperature or baking time at all, which is typical of loose-leaf cards written for cooks who knew their own range.
- Oven temperatureThe original specifies neither heat nor time. A moderate oven, around 350F, is the usual modern equivalent for a cake of this proportion; expect roughly 30 to 35 minutes in a single 8-inch pan and 15 to 18 in gem pans, but test rather than trust the clock.
- Gem pansGem pans are cast-iron baking pans with individual cups, varying in depth and shape from modern muffin tins. A standard 12-cup muffin pan stands in; this batter should fill roughly 10 cups.
- The hinge: fold, don't beatThe stiff whites are the only lift beyond the baking powder in terms of texture. Fold them in with a spatula in two or three additions after the flour and milk are combined; stirring them in flat gives a heavier, tighter crumb.
- Butter quantityA quarter cup is 4 tablespoons, which is lean for a cup of sugar. Have it properly softened or it will not cream, and expect a firm, plain crumb rather than a rich one — that is what "plain cake" means here.
- Alternating milk and flourSift the baking powder with the flour first, then add it in three parts with the half cup of milk in two, beginning and ending with flour. This keeps the batter from breaking.
- The trailing linesThe fragment "1/4 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 egg" at the end is not part of the method; it appears to be the opening of a variant or of the following recipe, carried over in transcription. Ignore it, or read it as the one-egg version of the same formula.
- YieldOne 8-inch round or square layer, serving 8, or about 10 small cakes.
"Plain cake" was a category rather than a single recipe in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks: a butter cake with no fruit, no spice and no icing assumed, meant for everyday tea rather than company. Its proportions -- a cup of sugar, a cup and a half of flour, chemical leavening, one pan or small pans -- place it among the cakes made possible by widely available baking powder, and it is often described as a lightened relative of the older pound cake formula. The absence of framing text here, and the stray ingredient line riding along at the end, are artefacts of how the page was set and transcribed.