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One-Egg Cake
One cup butter, one and a half cups sugar, three of flour, one of sweet milk, one egg, tea-spoon soda, two tea-spoons cream tartar in the flour, cup raisins chopped fine. - Mrs. A. S. C.
A plain economy cake from the era when eggs were seasonal and expensive. The original gives ingredients only, so the method has to be inferred from period practice: cream the butter and sugar, beat in the egg, then add the milk and the sifted flour alternately, folding the floured raisins in last.
- LeaveningOne teaspoon soda with two teaspoons cream of tartar is homemade baking powder in the usual 1:2 ratio; depending on the conversion used it is equivalent to somewhere between three and four teaspoons of modern baking powder. Mixed this way it reacts as soon as it meets the milk, so get the batter into the pan and into the oven without delay.
- Sweet milk"Sweet" simply means fresh, unsoured whole milk, specified because period cake recipes frequently call for sour milk or buttermilk instead. Use whole milk; skim gives a drier crumb.
- The butter looks highA cup of butter (8 oz) against three cups of flour and a single egg is very rich by modern standards and light on binding. Other one-egg cakes of the period often call for less butter, half a cup or under, but the figure as printed is what the contributor gave.
- Cream tartar in the flourThe instruction to sift the cream of tartar with the flour is deliberate. Keeping the acid and the soda apart until mixing time is what prevents the leavening from spending itself in the bowl.
- Flour the raisinsToss the chopped raisins in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in, or they sink to the bottom of a batter this soft.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading; expect roughly 45 to 55 minutes in a greased and floured loaf pan, or about 30 minutes in two 8-inch layers; test with a skewer in the centre.
- Flour measureNineteenth-century flour measures were not standardised, and a cup could weigh anywhere from about 4 1/4 to 5 oz depending on whether it was sifted or scooped and settled, so reckon on roughly 13 to 15 oz for the three cups, and hold back a little if the batter seems stiff.
- YieldEnough batter for a large loaf or two layers. It keeps well wrapped for two or three days.
One-egg cakes fill several pages of American community cookbooks from the 1870s onward for a straightforward reason: before year-round commercial egg production, hens laid heavily in spring and barely at all in cold weather, and a cook working in January counted eggs carefully. Recipes were graded almost like a price list, from the many-egg pound and sponge cakes down through three-egg and two-egg cakes to this, the frugal end of the scale, where chemical leavening does the lifting that beaten eggs would otherwise do. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing here is the older method; packaged baking powder was on the market well before The Dixie Cook Book appeared in the 1880s, though contributors went on mixing their own, and adulteration of commercial tins was a genuine complaint of the period. The initialled attribution, "Mrs. A. S. C.", is typical of the book's construction: it drew on recipes contributed by Southern housekeepers, and initials of this kind would presumably have identified the contributor to readers who knew her.