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Cheap Cake for Sauce
2 eggs. 1/2 cup butter. 2 1/2 cups flour. 2 teaspoons baking powder. 1 cup sugar. 1/2 cup milk. Orange flavor.
This is a formula rather than a method: Mrs. Wilson's readers were expected to know how a plain butter cake goes together. The proportions are sound, but everything about mixing, pan and oven has been left out.
- Method, since none is givenCream the softened butter with the sugar, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the sifted flour and baking powder alternately with the milk. Add the flavouring last and bake at once, before the baking powder is spent.
- OvenNo oven is specified. A cake of this size is usually baked at about 350F; a single 8-inch square or round pan takes roughly 25 to 30 minutes, a loaf pan closer to 40.
- "Orange flavor"Probably bottled orange extract, about 1 teaspoon, though grated zest is not ruled out and gives a better result. Some of the milk can be replaced with orange juice, bearing in mind that the acid will react with the baking powder.
- Butter and measuringHalf a cup of butter is 4 oz, one American stick, 113 g. Cookbooks of the period generally expected butter to be packed solidly into the cup rather than softened and spooned, so weigh it if you can.
- FlourWith two and a half cups of flour to half a cup of milk and two eggs, expect a stiff batter; add milk a spoonful at a time until it drops heavily from the spoon.
- What "for sauce" meansThe cake is not the dessert; it is the base for a hot pudding sauce, hard sauce, or stewed fruit. It is deliberately plain and slightly dry, which is why it takes a wet sauce so well.
- YieldAbout eight servings from one 8-inch pan. It keeps two or three days wrapped, and stale slices are better under sauce than fresh ones.
Mrs. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal during and just after the First World War, when the U.S. Food Administration's economy campaigns shaped how American households were told to cook, and her books carry that thrift into the 1920s. A "cheap cake for sauce" belongs to a whole class of deliberately unshowy cakes — plain cake, cottage pudding, one-egg cake — built to be flooded with a hot sweet sauce rather than iced. The logic was simple household economy: the sauce carried the flavour and the moisture, so the cake could be made with modest butter and sugar and a couple of eggs, and could be baked a day ahead or used up when it had gone dry.