One Egg Cake
1/4 cup butter or butter substitute, cream this with one cup sugar. Add one egg and mix well. Sift together, 1 2/3 cups flour with 1½ tsp. Royal baking powder. Add this alternately with milk, enough to make cake batter (from 1/2 to 1 cup). If sour milk is used, add 1/2 tsp. soda. This may be used as a foundation cake for a great many kinds.
— Mrs. Roscoe Blunt
A plain economy cake from the era when eggs were counted carefully. The original gives no pan, no oven and no time, so the notes below fill those gaps.
- The typo in the baking powder"11/2 tsp." is 1 1/2 teaspoons, not eleven halves. With 1 2/3 cups flour that is a normal ratio.
- Oven and panBake at 350F. The batter fills one 8-inch square or two thin 8-inch rounds; allow about 25-30 minutes for the square, 18-22 for layers, and test with a skewer.
- Butter substituteIn this period that meant oleomargarine, lard, or a hydrogenated shortening such as Crisco. Modern stick margarine or shortening both work; butter gives the best flavour and a slightly firmer crumb.
- The milk is deliberately vague"From 1/2 to 1 cup" is a real range, not an error — flours varied enormously. Start at 1/2 cup and add until the batter drops heavily from the spoon rather than pouring; around 2/3 cup usually lands right with modern all-purpose flour.
- Sour milkNot spoiled fresh milk. Use buttermilk, and add the 1/2 teaspoon soda as directed; keep the baking powder as well, since the soda is there to neutralise the acid rather than to do all the lifting.
- Royal baking powderA cream-of-tartar (tartrate) powder, single-acting in its early form. Any modern double-acting powder substitutes one for one, but get the batter into the oven promptly either way.
- "Foundation cake"The point of the recipe. Fold in a half cup of raisins or chopped nuts, flavour with a teaspoon of vanilla or lemon zest, or sift a quarter cup of cocoa in with the flour and add a little more milk.
- YieldAbout eight modest squares, or one filled two-layer cake for six to eight.
One-egg cakes fill the cake chapters of American community cookbooks from the 1890s through the 1940s, and they are a good index of household economy: eggs were seasonal and expensive, so a cake that stretched a single one with chemical leavening was worth printing. The reliance on "Royal baking powder" by brand name is characteristic too — Royal ran an aggressive campaign against alum-based competitors in this period, and its name appears in recipes the way "Jell-O" or "Crisco" later would. Philathea cookbooks were fundraisers compiled by Philathea classes, the young women's Bible-study groups within the Baraca-Philathea movement, which dates from the 1890s and spread nationally through Protestant Sunday schools thereafter, and their contents are exactly what you would expect: signed, thrifty recipes from members' own kitchens, of which Mrs. Roscoe Blunt's is a fair sample.