One-Egg Cake
1/4 cup butter. 1/2 cup sugar. 1 egg. 1/2 cup milk 1 1/2 cups flour. 1 teaspoon baking powder. 1 teaspoon vanilla or lemon.
The book gives proportions only, in the shorthand of a period when every cook knew what to do with butter, sugar and an egg. The method is the standard creaming procedure, and the quantities are sound as written.
- Method, since none is givenCream the softened butter and sugar until pale, beat in the egg, then add the sifted flour and baking powder alternately with the milk, beginning and ending with flour. Stir in the flavoring last and do not beat after the flour goes in beyond what is needed to smooth the batter.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. A cake of this size suits a moderate oven, in modern terms around 350F; allow roughly 25 to 30 minutes in a single layer and 30 to 35 in a loaf, and test rather than trust the clock.
- Pan and yieldThis is a small batter, roughly 3 cups. It fills one 8-inch round layer, a small 8x4 loaf, or about 8 to 10 cupcakes. Doubling works cleanly if you want two layers.
- Ingredient temperatureButter, egg and milk are best at room temperature. Cold milk added to creamed butter can split the mixture, which tends to coarsen the crumb.
- Baking powderA teaspoon to a cup and a half of flour is on the modest side by modern standards, but workable with the egg for lift. Older single-acting powders began releasing gas as soon as they were wetted, which is why period cake directions generally urged getting the batter into the oven promptly; with double-acting powder the urgency is less.
- FlourUse plain all-purpose flour, spooned into the cup and levelled. Recipes of this period commonly assumed sifted flour, so sifting will give a lighter crumb. Self-rising flour would add leavening well beyond the teaspoon listed.
- FlavoringA teaspoon of extract is a full measure for this quantity. 'Lemon' here most likely means lemon extract rather than juice; grated zest from half a lemon can be substituted.
- ServingA one-egg cake is on the plain, dry side, and takes well to being eaten plain, dusted with sugar, or split with jam. A thin water icing suits it if you want to frost it.
The one-egg cake is the plainest rung on a ladder of American cake formulas that ran from one-egg through two-, three- and four-egg cakes up to the pound cake, each step richer and more expensive. Recipes like this one earned their place in the book by economy: Mary A. Wilson is generally said to have written for the Ladies' Home Journal and to have worked in food conservation during the First World War, and her books are full of small batters that stretch butter, sugar and eggs without ruining the result. The bare list of proportions, with no method at all, is itself a period signal. Creaming butter and sugar, alternating flour with milk, was assumed knowledge, so the cookbook only needed to supply the arithmetic.