Two Egg Cake
Two eggs, 1 cup sugar, 1 tbsp. butter, 1/2 cup milk, 1 cup (heaped) flour, 1 tsp. Slade's cream tartar, 1/2 tsp. soda, 1/2 tsp. vanilla. Cream butter and sugar; add milk and then flour which has the cream tartar and soda in it. Add the eggs well beaten, last. Bake about twenty min.
— Mrs. Frank A. Kelley
A plain butter cake from the era when cooks mixed their own leavening at the table. It is short on fat by modern standards, so treat it as a light, quick everyday cake rather than a rich layer cake.
- Oven and panNo temperature or tin is given. Twenty minutes points to a shallow pan: an 8-inch round or square layer, or a dozen cupcakes, at 350-375F. In a loaf tin the same batter needs 35-40 minutes and will be drier.
- Slade's cream tartarD. & L. Slade Co. of Boston was a spice and cream-of-tartar house; any modern cream of tartar substitutes exactly. With 1/2 tsp soda, this is a home-mixed baking powder — if you replace both with commercial baking powder, the usual equivalent is about 2 tsp.
- Sift the leavening inThe soda and cream of tartar go into the flour, not the liquid, and for good reason: once wetted they begin reacting at once. Sift them through the flour twice and get the cake into the oven promptly.
- One tablespoon of butterThat is not a misprint, but it is barely enough to cream with a full cup of sugar. Soften the butter thoroughly and work it with the sugar until sandy rather than fluffy; two tablespoons gives a noticeably better crumb without changing the character.
- Heaped cup of flourA heaped cup is roughly 5 1/2 to 6 oz (155-170 g) of soft flour — appreciably more than a level modern cup. Weigh it if you can.
- Eggs lastBeating the eggs separately and folding them in at the end is doing the aerating work here, since so little butter has been creamed. Beat them until pale and thick, and fold rather than stir.
- YieldOne 8-inch layer, serving six to eight. Doubled, it makes a two-layer cake.
Cakes named for their egg count — one-egg, two-egg, four-egg — were common in American community cookbooks between about 1880 and 1930, and the number was a plain statement of economy. Eggs were seasonal and priced accordingly, and here cream of tartar and soda pick up lift that more eggs would have supplied. The naming of a brand, Slade's, is characteristic of these fundraising collections: contributors wrote down what stood on their own shelf, and Boston-area books of the period name Slade's cream of tartar the way others name Rumford or Cleveland's baking powder. Philathea cook books were compiled by Philathea classes, the adult young-women's Sunday school movement organized in the 1890s, and sold to support class and church work.