Plain Cake
1/4 cup shortening 1 cup sugar 1 egg 1 teaspoon vanilla extract or other flavoring 1 cup milk or water 2 cups flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/2 teaspoon salt Cream shortening; add sugar slowly, add well beaten egg and flavoring; sift together flour, baking powder and salt and add to mixture a little at a time, alternately with liquid. Bake in greased loaf, layer or patty pans in moderate oven. May also be used hot for cottage pudding.
A lean, thrifty one-egg cake of the sort every early-twentieth-century book carried under the name "plain cake" — enough fat and egg to hold together, and not much more. It works, but a few of its assumptions need translating.
- Moderate oven350F. At that temperature a loaf takes about 45 to 50 minutes, 8-inch layers 20 to 25, and patty pans 15 to 18. Test with a skewer in the center.
- Patty pansSmall individual tins, a forerunner of the cupcake pan. A standard 12-cup muffin tin, filled two-thirds, is a reasonable stand-in, though patty pans were often shallower and smaller.
- The baking powderThree teaspoons to two cups of flour is high by current practice. Royal was a cream-of-tartar powder, single-acting, so much of its gas was released as soon as the batter was wetted rather than in the oven; with a modern double-acting powder, 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons will do the same work.
- ShorteningAny solid fat: lard, vegetable shortening, or butter. A quarter cup is very little to cream, so have it genuinely soft at room temperature or the sugar will simply sit in it.
- Milk or waterNot an idle choice. Milk gives a softer crumb and browner crust; water, presumably used when milk was short or dear, produces a drier cake that stales faster. Use milk unless you have a reason not to.
- MixingAlternating dry and liquid matters here because there is so little fat to carry the flour. Begin and end with the flour mixture, and stop as soon as it comes together — this batter turns tough quickly.
- YieldRoughly one 8x4-inch loaf, two thin 8-inch layers, or a dozen small cakes.
- Cottage puddingThe closing line means the cake served hot in bowls under a pour of sauce — vanilla, hard sauce, or a thin lemon or berry sauce. Cut it warm; the low fat content means it eats better hot than cold.
"Plain cake" was a category rather than a specific dish: an everyday butter-poor cake with one egg, made in quantity for children's tea, church suppers and the household run on a budget, as opposed to the richer pound cakes made for company. Its appearance in a Royal Baking Powder promotional book is not accidental — the company distributed cookbooks widely to establish chemical leavening as the ordinary way to raise a cake, displacing beaten eggs and yeast, and a recipe like this one demonstrates the point efficiently. The final line about cottage pudding reflects the same economy of thought. One batter, three pans, and a second appearance as dessert if any is left over.