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Park Street Cake
2 cups sugar 1/2 cup butter 1 cup milk 3 cups flour 4 eggs vanilla salt 2 tsp. Royal baking pow.
Cream butter and sugar, add egg yolks well beaten, then the beaten whites go in last. Can be flavored with lemon or almond. This makes two loaves.
A community-cookbook cake written for someone who already knows how to build a butter cake — the milk and flour are listed but never actually mentioned in the method, and no oven temperature or time is given. Here is what the page leaves out.
- The missing stepFlour and milk are in the ingredient list but absent from the instructions. Sift the flour with the baking powder and a scant 1/2 teaspoon salt, then add it to the creamed mixture alternately with the milk, beginning and ending with flour. Fold in the beaten whites last, as directed.
- OvenNone is given. A cake of this size bakes at 350F. Loaves take roughly 40-50 minutes; test with a skewer at 40.
- "Two loaves"Two standard 8x4 or 9x5 loaf pans, greased and floured. The same batter fills two 9-inch round layers, which will bake in about 25-30 minutes.
- Royal baking powderA cream-of-tartar (single-acting) powder in this period, so the batter was meant to reach the oven promptly. Modern double-acting powder is more forgiving, but 2 teaspoons for 3 cups of flour is on the low side — the four eggs are doing much of the lifting, which is why the whites are beaten and folded separately.
- Flavoring quantity"Vanilla" with no measure means about 1 teaspoon. If using almond extract instead, 1/2 teaspoon is plenty; for lemon, 1 teaspoon of extract or the grated zest of one lemon.
- Creaming the butterHalf a cup of butter to two cups of sugar is a lean ratio, and the mixture will look sandy rather than fluffy. Beat it a good five minutes with softened (not melted) butter to work in as much air as possible.
- Egg whitesBeat to soft peaks, not stiff and dry, and fold in thirds. Overbeaten whites break up in the folding and the cake loses the rise the recipe depends on.
- ServingPlain, this is a keeping cake for tea, good sliced and buttered the next day. It takes a boiled or a simple confectioners'-sugar icing without becoming too sweet.
The Philathea cook book belongs to a genre that flooded American parish halls in the early twentieth century: the fundraising collection compiled by a church class, with each contributor's specialty printed more or less as she wrote it down. Philathea classes were the young women's wing of the Baraca-Philathea movement, an adult Sunday-school organization generally traced to Syracuse, New York, in the 1890s, and their chapters spread widely enough that many such books survive. The proportions read as a lighter relative of the old 1-2-3-4 cake -- one cup butter, two sugar, three flour, four eggs -- with the butter halved; whether that was an economy or simply a preference for a lighter crumb the page does not say. Names like "Park Street" in these collections often point to a church, a chapel or a street a contributor lived on rather than to anything about the cake, though this one goes unexplained.