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Gertrude's Favorite Cake
3 cups flour 21/2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1/2 level teaspoon salt 3/4 cup butter 3/4 cup water 4 eggs Flavoring 1½ cups granulated sugar Sift flour, baking powder and salt three times. Cream sugar and butter, break in one egg, add a little of flour and water, beat well, continue this process until you have used all eggs, add flavoring last.
A plain butter cake in the promotional-cookbook style: the ingredients are listed but the baking is left entirely to the cook. Everything you need to supply is below.
- No oven temperature or timeBake at 350F. As three 8-inch layers, 22-28 minutes; as two 9-inch layers, 30-35; in a tube or loaf pan, 50-60 minutes until a skewer comes out clean.
- Pan and yieldThe batter fills three 8-inch layer tins comfortably. Grease and flour, or line the bases with parchment.
- Calumet Baking PowderA widely advertised Chicago brand of the period, later marketed as double-acting; any modern double-acting powder substitutes measure for measure. The 2 1/2 teaspoons is in the normal range for 3 cups of flour; do not increase it.
- "Flavoring"Unspecified in the original. One to two teaspoons of vanilla, or a teaspoon of lemon extract with a little grated zest, suits this batter.
- Water, not milkWater gives a lighter, paler crumb. Milk works and gives a richer, softer one.
- The mixing method is the hingeEggs go in whole, one at a time, each followed by a little flour and a little water, with a good beating between. The flour is what keeps the batter from breaking as the eggs go in, so do not add two eggs at once.
- Sifting three timesAerates the flour and distributes the powder and salt evenly. With modern flour, one thorough sift with the powder and salt is enough, though weighing the flour at about 360 g is more reliable than cups.
- Butter temperatureCool room temperature, around 65F. Warm butter will not hold air through the creaming and the cake will bake short and heavy.
Reliable Recipes was not a cookbook sold for profit but an advertising booklet issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, which called for its own product by name in nearly every leavened recipe and reprinted the collection through many editions in the early twentieth century. Cakes titled for a woman's given name -- Gertrude's, Aunt Sally's, Bride's -- were a convention of the era's community and promotional cookbooks, often said to signal a recipe passed along by a real cook rather than devised by the company, though in a branded booklet the names were as often editorial as genuine. The recipe itself is a standard American butter cake of the period, made with water rather than milk, and it carries the unusual instruction to add each whole egg with a little flour and water.