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Buford Cake
One cup butter, two of white sugar, four of sifted flour, five eggs beaten separately, one cup sour milk, tea-spoon soda, pound seeded raisins chopped a little; beat the butter and sugar to a cream, add the yolks and milk, and stir in the flour with soda well mixed through it; then add the white of the eggs beaten to a stiff froth, and lastly the raisins dredged with a little flour; bake one and onehalf hours. Use coffee-cups to measure. This makes a cake for a six quart pan. -
A large plain fruited butter cake of the sour-milk-and-soda school, leavened almost entirely by creamed butter, whipped whites and one teaspoon of soda. Nothing here is difficult, but the measure and the pan size both need translating.
- The coffee-cup measureThe recipe tells you to measure in coffee-cups rather than a standard cup, and 19th-century coffee-cups varied, commonly reckoned at somewhere near 8 fluid ounces. The proportions are what matter: 1 part butter, 2 sugar, 4 flour, 1 sour milk. Using an 8 oz cup throughout gives roughly 1/2 lb butter, about 14 oz sugar and about 1 lb sifted flour, which is a very large cake; halving the whole thing is reasonable for a modern household.
- Sour milk and soda"Sour milk" is naturally soured raw milk, not spoiled pasteurized milk. Use cultured buttermilk, cup for cup; one teaspoon of soda is on the generous side for a single cup of soured milk, but it is what the recipe calls for. There is no baking powder in the formula and none is needed, but the batter should go into the pan promptly once the soda meets the buttermilk.
- The oven, which the recipe omitsA moderate oven, around 325F, suits a cake this deep and this heavily fruited better than a hotter one, which risks crusting before the center sets. An hour and a half is plausible at that temperature for a full-sized cake; test with a skewer in the thickest part.
- A six-quart panThat is a very large deep pan, bigger than a standard tube pan and roughly what two deep 9-inch tins would hold between them. If you make the full quantity, divide it between two pans rather than heaping one, and grease and line the base with paper. Batter should come no more than two-thirds up the side.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" means the seeds were picked out by hand, a chore that vanished with the spread of seedless varieties. Modern raisins need only a rough chop. A pound is about 3 cups; dredging them in flour, as directed, is what keeps them from sinking.
- Beating the whitesFive whites beaten stiff are a substantial part of the lift. Fold them in with a light hand after the flour, then the raisins last, and stop mixing as soon as no white streaks remain. Overworking at this stage produces a close, heavy crumb.
- Yield and keepingThe full recipe makes a very large cake, perhaps 18 to 24 slices. Such cakes are often said to improve on the second day; wrap it well once completely cool.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of large subscription compilations edited by Estelle Woods Wilcox in the 1880s, drawing heavily on her earlier Buckeye Cookery material with Southern additions, and its cake chapter is full of dishes carrying surnames and place names: the contributor's own, a neighbor's, a local family of standing. Buford is a name found across Virginia, Tennessee and Georgia, and there is no way now to tell which household or town this particular cake honored, only that naming a cake after its source was the ordinary courtesy of the period. What the recipe does document precisely is the leavening moment it sits in: sour milk with a teaspoon of soda, plus five eggs with the whites beaten separately, was the standard way to raise a rich cake in a kitchen that still had daily raw milk on hand and did not yet reach automatically for a can of baking powder. The instruction to "use coffee-cups to measure" is equally of its time, when a cookbook could assume the reader's crockery was close enough to everyone else's.