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Boston Favorite Cake
2/3 cup butter 2 cups sugar 4 eggs. 2 cup milk 3½ cups flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 5 teaspoons baking powder Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, eggs beaten until light, then milk and flour mixed and sifted with baking powder. This recipe makes two loaves, or one-half the mixture may be baked in individual tins. 2 eggs 1 cup sugar 2/3 cup thin cream 3½ cups flour
The text as printed is jumbled, with the ingredient list broken across the method and at least one figure clearly corrupted. Read it as a plain butter cake and settle the proportions before you start.
- The flour figureTwo amounts appear: 3½ cups and "12½ cups." The second cannot be right. Take 3½ cups as the working figure, though the page is jumbled enough that the original may have read differently.
- The missing butterThe method begins "Cream the butter" but no quantity survives in this text. Half a cup (1 stick, 4 oz) is a reasonable amount for a plain loaf cake of this size; much less will read as a very lean cake.
- Milk or cream, not bothBoth 1 cup milk and 2/3 cup thin cream are listed, and the method calls for only one liquid. Use 1 cup milk, or 2/3 cup light cream if you want a richer crumb — a cup of each would drown the flour.
- Thin creamPeriod shorthand for what is now sold as light or coffee cream, roughly 18-20 percent fat. Half-and-half is the closest ordinary substitute; heavy cream is too rich here.
- Baking powderFive teaspoons to 3½ cups of flour is a little more than current practice, which runs about 1 to 1¼ teaspoons per cup. Around 3½ to 4 teaspoons of modern double-acting powder will give a finer crumb and less risk of a chemical aftertaste.
- MixingFold the sifted flour and powder in with the milk alternately and stop as soon as the flour disappears. This is a creamed batter with a good deal of leavening; overbeating after the flour goes in gives tunnels and a tough top.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given in this text. Bake at 350F: about 40-50 minutes for loaves, 20-25 for individual tins, testing with a skewer at the center.
- YieldTwo small loaf pans (roughly 8 by 4 inches), or one loaf plus about a dozen cupcakes if you divide the batter as suggested.
This is the house cake of the Boston Cooking School, the institution Fannie Farmer took over as principal in 1891 and whose cook book she rewrote in 1896 — a reliable plain butter cake rather than a regional specialty. Its heavy dose of baking powder places it firmly in the chemical-leavening era: by the 1890s commercial baking powder had spread widely, though soda with sour milk remained in common use, and cookbooks began printing cake recipes as fixed ratios of butter, sugar, egg, liquid and flour. Farmer is best known for standardizing those ratios in level cupfuls and spoonfuls — a practice she popularized rather than invented alone — which is why a recipe this terse was expected to work at all, and why the corrupted figures in this printing are so easy to spot against the pattern.