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Breakfast Cake
Mrs. C. Bradley.
One pint of flour, three tablespoons of butter, three tablespoons of sugar, one egg, one cup sweet milk, one teaspoon cream tarter, one-half teaspoon soda; to be eaten with butter.
A plain chemically leavened breakfast cake of the sort that filled American cookbooks once cream of tartar and soda became cheap. The original assumes you know how to mix and bake it, so the gaps are the work.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume in a pint cup: 2 cups, or about 8-9 oz of all-purpose. Scoop lightly rather than packing it in.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabber a nineteenth-century kitchen also had on hand. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- Cream tarter and sodaCream of tartar plus soda in these proportions is homemade baking powder; the pair here is roughly equivalent to 2 teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder. Mix the acid into the dry flour and the soda in last, then get the pan into the oven promptly, because single-acting leavening spends most of its lift at the mixing bowl.
- Method the recipe omitsCream the butter and sugar, beat in the egg, then add the flour and milk alternately. Overbeating after the flour goes in gives a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- OvenNo temperature is given; the recipe leaves it to the cook. Something in the 350-375F range suits a shallow cake of this size.
- Pan and timeBake in a greased 8-inch square or round pan, 20-25 minutes, until the centre springs back. In muffin cups, 15-18 minutes.
- Yield and servingAbout eight to nine servings. It is meant to be cut warm and buttered at the table, like a cross between cornbread and a plain cake, and it stales by the next morning.
The Home Cook Book belongs to the great wave of charity compilations of the 1870s, assembled from recipes signed by named contributors -- here Mrs. C. Bradley -- and sold to raise money for local institutions. "Breakfast cake" in such books rarely seems to mean a dessert; it generally means a quick bread baked in a shallow pan and eaten hot with butter at the morning meal, in the same slot a biscuit or a griddle cake would fill. Recipes of this type multiplied once cream of tartar and saleratus became reliable commercial goods, which let a cook raise a batter in minutes instead of setting a sponge the night before. Commercial baking powder was on sale by this date, but many households appear to have gone on buying the two components separately and combining them in the bowl, which is exactly what this recipe does. Note: the brevity is characteristic -- a contributor listed what to buy and trusted her reader to know the rest.