Cream Cake
2 eggs. 1 cup sugar. 2/3 cup thin cream. 1 2/3 cups flour. 2½ teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon cinnamon ¼ teaspoon mace ¼ teaspoon ginger Put unbeaten eggs in a bowl, add sugar and cream, and beat vigorously. Mix and sift remaining ingredients, then add to first mixture.
Bake thirty minutes in a shallow cake pan.
This is a cream cake in the older sense: no butter at all, with heavy cream standing in as the fat and the eggs beaten whole with the sugar. The quantities as printed are unreliable, so treat the method rather than the numbers as the guide.
- The hinge is the beatingWhole unbeaten eggs, sugar and cream are beaten together vigorously before any dry ingredient goes in. That beating is the only aeration besides the baking powder, so work at it until the mixture is pale, thick and visibly increased in volume.
- Cream means heavy creamCream means rich cream -- The recipe does not specify, but a butterless cake of this type depends on the cream for its fat, so a rich cream (modern heavy or whipping cream) is the sensible reading. A thin or light cream is likely to give a leaner, tougher crumb, since there is no butter to compensate.
- Baking powder quantity is not usable as printedThe leavening figure at the head of the list is garbled and cannot be converted with any confidence. A plain butterless cake of this type would normally take on the order of a teaspoon or two of baking powder per cup of flour; use a current cream cake formula for the actual amount.
- The spice figuresThe two "14 teaspoon" entries for mace and ginger are almost certainly quarter-teaspoons, mangled in printing. Mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed and is milder and more floral; ground nutmeg, in an equal or slightly smaller quantity, is the usual substitute.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Nothing in the text indicates an oven heat, so any figure is a modern guess; a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable starting point for a shallow cake baked thirty minutes, and should be watched rather than trusted.
- "Shallow cake pan"This indicates a single shallow layer rather than a loaf or tube pan. Since none of the quantities survive, no pan size can be worked out from the recipe; a square 8-inch pan is a common modern approximation, and a thinner sheet would need less than the stated thirty minutes.
- Doneness and servingTest with a skewer in the centre and look for the edges pulling slightly from the pan. Cakes of this kind are best eaten the day they are baked, cut in squares and served plain or with fruit.
Cream cakes belong to a family of nineteenth-century American cakes built without butter, in which sweet cream carried the fat and the eggs did the lifting. They were practical in households that had milk and cream to hand and treated butter as a saleable or rationed commodity, and they gave a soft, close, slightly damp crumb quite unlike a creamed butter cake. The warm spicing here of cinnamon, mace and ginger is typical of the plainer cakes of the period, and mace often served as the genteel alternative to nutmeg. Recipes of this sort also mark the moment when chemical leavening had become entirely routine in American baking, so that a cook could raise a cake in half an hour without yeast and without the long beating that earlier sponge methods demanded.