Home › Cake-Making › Eggless Cake
Eggless Cake
One and a half tea-cups sugar, one of sour milk, three (level) of sifted flour, half cup butter, tea-spoon soda, half tea-spoon cinnamon, half tea-spoon grated nutmeg, tea-cup raisins chopped and well floured. - Miss Louise Skinner.
A plain spice-and-raisin cake leavened entirely by soda reacting with sour milk. The original gives no pan, no oven and no time, all of which were assumed knowledge.
- The teacupIn American books of this period a tea-cup is usually reckoned at about 3/4 of a modern cup (6 fl oz), though some writers use it interchangeably with a full cup. Measuring everything with the same vessel keeps the proportions right whichever reading you take; the ratio of sugar to flour to fat is what carries the cake.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured milk, thick and acidic; in the 1880s that would usually have been raw milk. Cultured buttermilk is the standing modern equivalent. Do not try to reproduce it by leaving pasteurised milk on the counter, which is as likely to spoil as to sour cleanly.
- SodaA full teaspoon of soda to one cup of sour milk is generous: roughly half that is usually reckoned enough to neutralise the acid in a cup of soured milk or buttermilk, and the surplus can leave a faint alkaline or soapy note. Mix the soda into the flour or dissolve it in the milk at the last moment, then get the batter into the pan promptly, as there is no baking powder to give a second lift in the oven.
- Butter and sugarHalf a cup of butter is about 4 oz, one stick. Cream it with the sugar until pale before adding anything else; with no eggs, the air beaten in at this stage is a large part of the structure.
- Flouring the raisinsTossing the chopped raisins in flour, taken from the measured three cups rather than in addition to them, keeps them suspended instead of sinking.
- Oven and panThe recipe names neither. A moderate oven, around 350F, in a greased and floured loaf tin or an 8-inch square is a reasonable modern reading. Reckon on 45 to 55 minutes for a loaf, 35 to 40 for the square, tested with a skewer.
- Yield and keepingAbout one loaf, ten to twelve slices. Cakes of this type are close-grained, and are often said to improve on the second day if kept wrapped.
Eggless cakes appear throughout late nineteenth-century American cookbooks not as a novelty but as ordinary household economy: eggs were seasonal and dearest in winter, when hens laid less, and a cook with sour milk and soda in the pantry could still put a spiced cake on the table. The sour milk here is doing double duty, supplying both the acid that activates the soda and the moisture and tenderness that eggs would otherwise provide. The Dixie Cook-Book, like many regional compilations of its day, carries recipes signed by named contributors, and the attribution to Miss Louise Skinner is typical of the form: a recipe set down in shorthand for a reader assumed to know how to judge her own oven. Recipes of this shape were revived on a much larger scale during the First World War, when eggs, butter and sugar were all subject to conservation campaigns.