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Laboratory Exercises (II)
CAKES.
2 1/2 C. flour 1/2 C. sugar 3/4 t. cloves 1/4 t. salt Feather Cake. 6 T. butter 1⅓ C. (?) milk 1.4 C. sugar 3 eggs 3 C. flour 5 t. baking powder 2½ t. vanilla 1. Grease cake pan well, put a sheet of white paper in bottom of the pan and grease it. 2. Sift flour, baking powder and salt together three times. 3. Cream the butter and add the sugar and beaten egg alternately. Beat well. 4. Add 1/3 of the flour mixture and 1/3 of the milk to the butter, sugar and egg and beat well. 5. Add another third of the flour and milk and beat again. 6. Add the rest of the flour and enough more milk to make a soft drop batter. 7. Add vanilla and beat well. 8. Put cake into pan at once and bake in a moderate oven. Spice Cake. 4 T. butter C. sugar 2+ C. flour 2 t. cinnamon t. cloves 1 egg and 1 yolk C. New Orleans molasses 1 t. soda + t. salt C. (?) sour milk 1. Grease cake pan. 2. Sift flour, soda, salt and spice together three times. 3. Cream the butter and add the sugar, egg and molasses. Beat well.
Two cake formulas from a school laboratory notebook, printed here with their fractions lost in transcription. Read them as a method to follow rather than a set of measurements to trust.
- The missing fractionsNearly every fraction in the original has dropped out of the text: "1.4 C. sugar", "C. sugar", "2+ C. flour", "t. cloves". Where a printed quantity is plainly incomplete, do not guess at a conversion; use a modern cake formula for proportions and treat these pages as a record of technique.
- AbbreviationsT. is tablespoon, t. is teaspoon, C. is cup. The 6 T. butter in the feather cake is 3 oz, or three-quarters of a standard stick.
- A moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. The original does not say what size pan; three cups of flour is more than a single 8-inch tin will hold, so divide it or use a larger pan, and test with a skewer in the centre rather than by time.
- Leavening in proportionFive teaspoons of baking powder to three cups of flour is heavy by current practice, where about one to one and a quarter teaspoons per cup is standard. Powders of the period were single-acting and their strength varied; a modern powder used at this rate may taste soapy and rise then collapse.
- Sour milk and sodaThe spice cake pairs 1 t. soda with sour milk, meaning naturally soured milk. Cultured buttermilk is the working substitute; pasteurised milk left out simply spoils. The acid of the milk does much of the lifting, though the molasses is acidic too.
- New Orleans molassesUnsulphured Louisiana cane molasses, not blackstrap and not the sulphured product. It is lighter and sweeter than blackstrap, which would overwhelm the cinnamon and cloves.
- Lining the panThe greased sheet of white paper does the job modern parchment does; cut a round for the base. The recipe asks only that the pan and the paper be well greased.
- Soft drop batterThe hinge of the feather cake is step 6: add milk only until the batter falls from the spoon in a soft mass rather than pouring. Flour absorbency varied and the cook was expected to judge it; the "(?)" beside the milk may simply mark an unreadable figure.
- The spice cake is unfinishedThe text breaks off after creaming the butter, sugar, egg and molasses. Fold in the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the sour milk as in the feather cake, then bake at 350F.
This comes from a school laboratory manual, not a cookbook: household arts was taught as a science, with pupils working from numbered steps at a bench and recording results. The style explains the terse imperatives, the insistence on sifting three times, and the levelled cup-and-spoon measurements, which spread through American teaching kitchens after Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School book of 1896 made standardised measures the norm. "Feather cake" is a generic period name for a plain butter cake made light with baking powder rather than beaten egg -- the sort of everyday layer cake a class might be set to produce. The spice cake beside it is its economical sibling, stretching one egg and a yolk with molasses and sour milk.