Quick Cake
1¾ cups flour. 1/3 cup soft butter 1½ cups brown sugar 2 eggs 1/2 cup milk 3 teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg 1/2 lb. dates, stoned and cut in pieces Put ingredients in a bowl and beat all together for three minutes, using a wooden cake spoon. Bake in a buttered and floured cake pan thirty-five to forty minutes. If directions are followed this makes a most satisfactory cake; but if ingredients are added separately it will not prove a success.
The virtue of this cake is the one-bowl method, which the original insists on twice. Note also that the printed ingredient list is incomplete.
- The missing flourNo flour appears in the list as printed, yet the batter cannot work without it; the text is defective at this point. For this quantity of sugar, eggs and fruit something in the region of 2 cups would be the editor's guess, but the original amount cannot be recovered from this page.
- The stray lines at the end"2/3 cup butter, 2 cups sugar, 4 eggs" does not belong to this recipe; it most likely begins the next one on the page. Ignore it.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, which was common before oven thermometers were standard. 350F is a safe modern choice for a cake of this richness and size, for the stated thirty-five to forty minutes.
- Beat all togetherThe warning is the hinge of the recipe: everything goes into the bowl at once and is beaten for three minutes. The text does not say why adding ingredients separately fails, only that it does. A mixer will shorten the beating time.
- Soft butter means softGenuinely room temperature, spreadable, not melted. Cold butter will not disperse in three minutes of hand beating and you will get streaks of unmixed fat.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons is a lot by current standards, though the batter is heavy, sugar-rich and carries half a pound of fruit. If the cake tastes soapy or metallic, drop to 2½ teaspoons next time.
- Dates"Stoned and cut in pieces" — buy pitted dates and check for stray pits anyway. Tossing the pieces in a spoonful of the flour keeps them from settling to the bottom.
- Pan and yieldAn 8-inch square or a 9-inch round pan suits this quantity and gives eight to ten servings. With this much sugar and fruit, lining the base with parchment is prudent if your pan is old or dark.
"Quick cake" here means quick to assemble rather than quick to bake — the point of interest is that everything goes into one bowl at once, which was still worth a printed warning at a time when the standard cake method was a sequence of creaming, separating eggs and folding. The "wooden cake spoon" points to hand beating rather than a domestic electric mixer, though hand mixing long outlasted the mixer's arrival. Dates, brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg were inexpensive flavourings in an American pantry supplied by long-distance trade, and date-and-spice cakes appear throughout the cake chapters of the period. The method anticipates the mid-century one-bowl and "dump" cakes later promoted by shortening and baking-powder manufacturers.