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Caramel Cake (One cup butter two of sugar)
One cup butter, two of sugar, a scant cup milk, one and a half cups flour, cup corn starch, whites of seven eggs, three tea-spoons baking powder in the flour; bake in a long pan. Te half pound. brown sugar, scant quarter pound chocolate, half up milk, butter size of an egg, two tea-spoons vanilla; mix thoroughly and cook as syrup until stiff enough to spread; spread on cake and set in the oven to dry. - Mrs. George Bever.
A white butter cake lightened with cornstarch, finished with a boiled brown-sugar-and-chocolate frosting. The original assumes you already know how to mix a cake, and it has two printer's errors worth reading past.
- The typos"Te half pound" is "Take half pound," and "half up milk" is half a cup. Nothing is missing from the ingredient list.
- Measures in modern termsOne cup butter is 2 sticks (8 oz); two cups sugar is about 14 oz; a scant cup of milk is a little under 8 fl oz. For the frosting, half a pound of brown sugar is roughly 1 cup packed plus 2 tablespoons, and butter "size of an egg" is usually reckoned at about 2 ounces, roughly 4 tablespoons, though period estimates vary.
- The chocolateA scant quarter pound means about 3 1/2 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate, which is generally what unqualified "chocolate" meant in cookbooks of this period. Modern semisweet or chips are likely to make the frosting cloying, since the sugar is already carrying it.
- Mixing, which the recipe omitsCream the butter and sugar, add milk alternately with the sifted flour, cornstarch and baking powder, then fold in the whites beaten stiff. Seven whites is about 7 oz, a scant cup. Folding rather than beating them in is what keeps the crumb fine and pale.
- Pan and ovenA "long pan" here means a rectangular pan rather than a round one; the book gives no dimensions, and a 9x13 is a reasonable modern stand-in. The recipe gives no oven guidance either; at about 350F expect roughly 40 to 45 minutes, testing from 35.
- "Cook as syrup until stiff enough to spread"This is the hinge. Boil the sugar, chocolate, milk and butter to the soft-ball stage, 238F on a thermometer, then take it off the heat, add the vanilla, and beat as it cools until it thickens. Spread it while it is still warm and pourable or it will tear the cake.
- Setting it in the oven to dryA few minutes in a cooling or very low oven firms the surface into a thin crust; left longer, the frosting can turn grainy and hard.
- YieldAbout 16 squares, assuming a 9x13 pan.
"Caramel" here names the frosting, not the cake beneath it: a boiled brown-sugar syrup beaten to a spreading consistency, the standard American icing of the late nineteenth century before confectioners' sugar frostings took over. The cake itself belongs to the family of white or silver cakes made with egg whites only, the natural companion to the gold cakes that used up the yolks, and the cornstarch standing in for a substantial share of the flour is a mark of the period, when boxed cornstarch had become a cheap pantry staple and cooks used it to soften the crumb. The recipe arrives credited to a contributor, Mrs. George Bever, in the compiled-by-subscription style that made these volumes as much a record of who baked in a community as of what they baked. That the chocolate goes into the icing and not the batter is worth noting: through the 1880s chocolate is generally said to have been more often a flavoring for creams and frostings than a cake ingredient in its own right.