Gold Loaf Cake
1/4 cup butter 3/4 cup sugar 1/4 cup milk Four eggs 1 cup flour 1 level tsp. Royal bak. pow.
Mix and bake as golden orange cake. Vanilla.
A short entry that assumes you have already read the golden orange cake a page or two earlier. The proportions are sound, but two things need settling before you start: what "four eggs" means, and what "mix and bake as" would have told you.
- Yolks, not whole eggsA cake called gold in this period is often made with yolks alone, paired with a silver cake that used the whites. Four yolks with a quarter cup of butter and one cup of flour gives a rich, close, yellow crumb; four whole eggs in that little flour will be wet and eggy. The original is genuinely ambiguous here, but the name argues for yolks.
- The missing cross-reference"Mix and bake as golden orange cake" points to another recipe in the same section that this page does not carry. Standard creaming method covers it: butter and sugar beaten pale, yolks added, then flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature. For a loaf of this size, 350F is a reasonable modern setting: a cup of flour in a loaf pan wants moderate heat and time, not a hard blast.
- Pan and timeA single 8x4-inch loaf pan, greased and floured. Expect 35 to 45 minutes; the batter is shallow, so start testing at 30.
- Royal baking powderRoyal was a cream-of-tartar powder, single-acting, and it began working as soon as the batter was moistened. One level teaspoon of modern powder should serve here; either way, get the batter into the oven promptly.
- VanillaThe bare word "Vanilla" at the end means flavour to taste: one teaspoon of extract, beaten in with the yolks.
- YieldOne small loaf, eight to ten thin slices. It is a plain tea cake rather than a dessert.
Gold and silver cakes were a matched pair, born of the fact that a cook who separated eggs for one cake was left holding the other half. Gold took the yolks and came out yellow and rich; silver took the whites and came out white and fine, and thrifty households baked both at once or served them marbled together in the same tin. The brand name in the ingredient list is worth noticing: Royal's name appears in recipes across community cookbooks of the early twentieth century, probably because the manufacturer's own pamphlets seem to have been a common source for contributors. The Philathea classes were young women's Bible study groups attached to Baptist and other Protestant Sunday schools, widespread in the United States and Canada in the 1900s and 1910s, and their fundraising cookbooks are built from exactly this kind of contribution -- short, familiar, written for someone who already knows the method and only needs the numbers.