Eggless Cake
One cup of sugar; one-third cup of butter; one cup of sweet milk. Stir the milk into the creamed butter and sugar. Sift three teaspoons of baking powder with three cups of flour. Flavor with nutmeg and add raisins or citron, as preferred.
The instructions stop before the baking, which was normal in a book that assumed you knew your own stove. What follows fills in the gaps and flags the places where a lean, eggless batter behaves differently from a modern butter cake.
- The hinge: do not overmixWith no egg to give structure, the crumb depends entirely on the baking powder and on the flour being handled gently. Stir the flour in only until no dry streaks remain; beating it will toughen the cake into something closer to a scone.
- Oven and timeNone is given. A cake of this size and richness belongs in a moderate oven, 350F, for about 45 minutes in a loaf pan or 30 to 35 minutes in an 8-inch square, until a skewer comes out clean.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the buttermilk or clabbered milk used in soda-raised cakes. Whole milk is the right substitute; skim will give a drier crumb here, since there is no egg yolk to compensate.
- Butter and saltOne-third cup is 5 1/3 tablespoons. Butter of the period was often salted for keeping; the recipe calls for no salt at all, so if you use unsalted, add half a teaspoon with the flour or the cake will taste flat.
- Flour measureCup measures of flour vary enormously with how the cup is filled. Around 12 1/2 ounces (355 g) for the three cups, spooned and levelled rather than scooped, gives a batter that is not overloaded with flour.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to three cups of flour, a teaspoon per cup, is a common proportion in recipes of the era and still works. Older powders were often single-acting, so bake promptly once the milk and flour are combined.
- Nutmeg and fruitGrate the nutmeg fresh, about half a teaspoon. Toss the raisins or chopped citron, a cup at most, in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- YieldOne 9x5-inch loaf or an 8-inch square pan, about 10 slices. It is a plain keeping cake rather than a dessert cake, and is best on the second day.
Eggless cakes filled a real need in household cookery long before rationing made them famous. Hens lay poorly in cold weather and eggs were expensive and irregular in supply, and many general cookbooks of the period carried a few cakes leavened by baking powder alone, alongside the egg-rich pound and sponge cakes. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, pitched its cook book at the practical middle-class housekeeper. The nutmeg and citron suggest a descendant of the older plain fruited loaf cakes, made economical by cheap and reliable chemical leavening.