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Cold Water Cake
1/4 cup butter. 1 cup sugar. 2 1/2 cups flour. 1 cup cold water. 3 eggs 1/2 teaspoon salt 21 21/2 leve. teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder Stir butter and sugar to a cream. a little at a time, alternating with flour, which should be well sifted with salt and bak- Add to this yolks of eggs well beaten. Add water, ing powder. Put whites of egg, well beaten, in last, and stir batter lightly until well mixed.
A plain creamed butter cake in which water stands in for milk. The method is straightforward, but the printed ingredient column has lost most of its quantities, so treat this as a technique to follow rather than a formula to weigh out.
- Missing quantitiesOnly the eggs, salt and baking powder are legible, and the baking powder figure is itself unclear. Butter, sugar, flour and water amounts are absent, so the proportions have to be taken from a comparable creamed cake if you intend to bake it.
- Order of workThe sentences appear out of sequence. The intended order is: cream butter and sugar, beat in the egg yolks, add the water alternately with the sifted flour, salt and baking powder, then fold in the beaten whites last.
- Calumet Baking PowderCalumet was advertised as a double-acting powder, combining an acid phosphate with sodium aluminium sulfate; the brand is still sold, though the formula has changed over time. Any modern double-acting baking powder can stand in measure for measure.
- "Level teaspoons"Insisting on level spoonfuls was part of the era's campaign for standardised measurement, at a time when older recipes were vaguer about how a spoon was filled. Fill a modern measuring spoon and strike it level, which is ordinary practice now.
- OvenNo temperature or time is given; period ranges rarely had a dependable gauge. A moderate oven, in modern terms around 350F, suits a cake of this type; time will depend entirely on the pan you choose, so bake until a skewer comes out clean.
- Folding, not stirring"Stir batter lightly until well mixed" is the hinge. Once the beaten whites go in, work with a spatula and stop as soon as no streaks remain; a thorough beating at that point collapses the only aeration the cake gets beyond the powder.
- Water instead of milkWater gives a plainer, more neutral crumb than a milk cake, which pairs well with a strongly flavoured frosting; milk solids and fat also tend to help a cake keep, so a water cake is generally best eaten fresh.
Reliable Recipes was published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, one of a great many free or near-free cookbooks that American manufacturers issued to put their brand into the hands of home bakers; the recipes are genuine, but the leavened ones name the sponsor's product. "Cold water cake" belongs to a family of older cakes -- water cakes, one-egg cakes -- that do without milk, an omission often explained by the difficulty of keeping milk on hand and sweet before mechanical refrigeration, though that account is more tradition than documented fact. Water was free and never soured, and with a chemical leavener doing the lifting the baker no longer needed the acid in sour milk to make the batter rise. The name simply describes the liquid.