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Foundation or Plain Cake
⅓ cup butter or shortening
2 teaspoons baking-powder
1 cup sugar
½ cup milk
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1¾ cup flour
Cream the butter or butter substitute, add sugar and continue creaming. Add well-beaten eggs. Mix and sift the dry ingredients and add alternately with the milk. Add flavoring. Bake in layers at 380° for twenty minutes. Any good filling and frosting may be used.
The batter may be varied by adding nuts, coconut, spices, etc., and may be baked as a loaf cake.
ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR CAKE (Measure Cake) 1 cup butter or shortening 3 teaspoons baking-powder 2 cups sugar
1 cup milk
3 cups flour
Flavoring
4 eggs
Cream the butter or shortening and sugar, add eggs. Mix and sift flour and baking-powder and add alternately with the milk. Flavor as desired. Bake as loaf or layer cake at 380-400° F. for twenty to forty-five minutes.
Two versions of the same idea: a creamed butter cake in easy ratios, meant to be dressed up with whatever filling and frosting the household had. Both are workable as written, with a few small adjustments.
- The flour quantity"13/4 cup flour" is a typesetting artifact for 1 3/4 cups. That plus 1 cup sugar and 2 eggs is a standard two-layer cake batter.
- Oven temperature380° is a temperature of a kind common once ovens were given numbered dials rather than "moderate." Set a modern oven to 375, and bake twenty minutes in layers, as the recipe says; a loaf will want longer, and the book's own range for the larger cake runs to 45 minutes.
- Add saltNeither recipe lists any. With unsalted butter, add 1/2 teaspoon salt to the first cake and 1 teaspoon to the One-Two-Three-Four.
- Butter substituteIn 1920s usage this meant oleomargarine, lard, or a hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Any of the modern equivalents work, but shortening gives a paler, softer crumb and less flavor, so the vanilla matters more.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons for 1 3/4 cups flour is on the generous side by modern habit; 1 1/2 teaspoons gives a finer crumb and less doming.
- Creaming is the hingeThere is no chemical leavening shortcut here that will save an undercreamed batter. Beat butter and sugar until visibly pale and fluffy, three to five minutes with a mixer, then add the eggs gradually so the mixture does not break.
- Alternating dry and milkBegin and end with the flour mixture, in three additions of dry and two of milk, and mix only until each disappears. Overworking after the flour goes in toughens the crumb.
- YieldThe foundation cake makes two 8-inch layers or one loaf, serving eight to ten. The One-Two-Three-Four is roughly double: three 8-inch layers, a 9x13 pan, or two loaves.
"Foundation" recipes were a hallmark of early twentieth-century domestic-science teaching: rather than printing fifty cake recipes, a book gave one base formula and told the cook to vary it with nuts, coconut, or spice -- exactly as this page does. The One-Two-Three-Four cake beside it is older and more purely mnemonic, one cup butter, two sugar, three flour, four eggs, a ratio that circulated in American and British cookery before standardized measuring cups, when a cook could scale it by any vessel at hand. The numerical oven temperature is itself a period marker, belonging to the years when "a moderate oven" was giving way to degrees.