Delicious Cake
— Inez B. Curtis
One tbsp. melted butter, 1 cup of bread flour, 1 cup sugar, 2 tsp. Royal baking powder, 2 tsp. cornstarch, pinch of salt. Sift all together. Break one or two eggs into melted butter, and fill the cup with cold milk, turn into the flour. Add one tbsp. cold water, 1 tsp. vanilla. Bake in muffin tins or in pan 30 minutes. Cheap, but very nice.
— Mrs. Albert H. Taylor
A thrifty one-egg cake built on a single measuring cup: the eggs and butter go in first, milk fills the rest. It works, but the original assumes knowledge the modern baker has to supply.
- The cup methodMelt the tablespoon of butter, break the egg or eggs into it in a one-cup measure, then add cold milk until the cup is full. Total liquid is one cup including egg and butter, so with two eggs you will use only about half a cup of milk and the cake will be richer.
- "Bread flour" is not today's bread flourIn American household books of this period the usual distinction was between bread flour and pastry flour, and bread flour covered the everyday household flour of the time, well below the protein of modern high-protein bread flour. All-purpose is the closest modern equivalent.
- Why the cornstarchCornstarch sifted into the flour lowers the effective protein and softens the crumb, the same principle as the home cake-flour substitute, though two teaspoons per cup is a much smaller amount than the usual two tablespoons. Keep it in.
- Baking powderRoyal was a cream-of-tartar powder. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder to one cup of flour is at the high end but works; the batter should go into the oven promptly.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 350F. Muffin tins will be done in 18 to 22 minutes, well before the stated half hour; the 30 minutes applies to a single pan.
- Pan size and yieldThe batter is small: roughly 9 to 12 standard muffins, or one 8-inch round layer; an 8-inch square will come out shallow and a 9x13 pan would give a cracker-thin sheet.
- Fat contentOne tablespoon of butter for a whole cake is what makes it "cheap." Expect something between a cake and a rich muffin, best eaten the day it is made, and grease the tins properly since there is little fat in the batter to help release it.
Church and society cookbooks like this one were assembled from members' contributions; the two names here -- one at the head and one at the foot -- most likely mean the transcription has caught the sign-off of the preceding recipe as well as this one's. The recipe itself belongs to a large family of turn-of-the-century "cheap cakes" or "one-egg cakes," economical formulas that leaned on chemical leavening rather than eggs and butter for lift. Royal Baking Powder advertised heavily in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and pressed the point that its cream-of-tartar formula was superior to alum powders, and contributors to books like this often wrote the brand name into their recipes. Cake flour was sold by this period but cost more than plain flour, so cornstarch served as the frugal substitute. "Cheap, but very nice" states the ethos of the genre outright.