Home › Recipes › Sugar Cake Made Without Eggs
Sugar Cake Made Without Eggs
8 ounces of sugar. 4 ounces of butter. 1 large coffee cupful of milk. Nutmeg to flavor, or carraway seeds. 2 teaspoonfuls of baking powder. 1 1/2 pounds of flour.
Mix up like biscuit, the butter melted and added to the milk with the sugar. Roll out and bake in a shallow pan. Brush over with milk before baking.
A stiff, biscuit-method sugar cake meant to be rolled and cut rather than poured. The proportions come from a trade manual, so they are given by weight and assume a baker's judgment about how much liquid the flour will take.
- The liquid is the problemEight ounces of sugar, four of butter and one cup of milk will not bring 1 1/2 lb (about 5 1/2 cups) of flour together into a rollable dough. Expect to add milk a few tablespoons at a time until it just coheres, or scale the flour back to about 1 lb; the original assumes a cook who mixes by feel.
- "1 large coffee cupful"A coffee cup of the period ran 6 to 8 fl oz, and "large" pushes it to 8 or a little over. Treat it as 1 cup and adjust as above.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons for 1 1/2 lb of flour is very light by modern practice, which runs closer to 1 teaspoon per cup. With no eggs for lift, use 1 teaspoon per cup of flour you actually end up using; period baking powders were single-acting, and their strength varied by brand.
- Mix like biscuitHere that means stir the melted butter, sugar and milk together, then work it into the flour and baking powder quickly and stop. Overworking this much flour with this little fat gives a tough, bready slab.
- Oven and panThe recipe gives no oven instruction. Roll about 1/2 inch thick into a shallow sheet pan and try a moderate oven, around 375F, for 20 to 25 minutes, until the surface is pale gold and the centre springs back. "Shallow pan" most likely means a sheet pan rather than a deep cake tin.
- Flavouring quantitiesThe recipe leaves them open: figure about 1 teaspoon grated nutmeg or 1 to 2 teaspoons caraway seed for this quantity of flour. Caraway was the older-fashioned of the two choices.
- Milk washBrushing with milk rather than egg is the point of an eggless cake -- it gives colour and a faint gloss without adding an egg to the shopping list. Do it just before the pan goes in, not in advance.
- Yield and cuttingA full batch fills a quarter-sheet pan and gives roughly 24 squares. Cut it warm, in the pan, and eat it the day it is made; with no eggs and little fat it stales fast.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late-nineteenth-century Chicago trade manuals aimed at hotel and restaurant kitchens, and it is generally attributed to Jessup Whitehead, whose books were written for cooks working to a budget and a clock rather than for householders. Eggless recipes appear in such books for a straightforward commercial reason: eggs were cheap in spring and dear in winter, and a pastry cook needed formulas that held up when they climbed in price. What results here is less a cake in the modern sense than a rolled sugar sheet in the older English tradition of the seed cake -- caraway offered as an alternative to nutmeg is the tell, since caraway-flavoured baking was already reading as old-fashioned by the 1890s.