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Cakes Without Butter
Five eggs well beaten, yolks and whites separately, one pound of powdered sugar; when well mixed let it stand an hour, then add one pound of flour, chop the mixture in very small cakes on tin plates; any flavouring may be used.
A butterless drop cake leavened entirely by beaten egg — closer to a sponge biscuit than anything we would call cake now. The instructions assume knowledge the original reader had and we do not, chiefly oven heat and the consistency of the batter.
- The ratio is very dryOne pound of sugar plus one pound of flour to only five eggs gives a stiff paste, not a pourable batter. Comparable sponge-drop recipes of the period generally use considerably more egg for the same pound of each; if the mixture will not drop from a spoon, suspect the proportions rather than your mixing.
- Weights in cupsA pound of powdered (in this period, finely sifted) sugar is roughly 3 3/4 cups modern confectioners' sugar or 2 1/4 cups granulated; a pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups. Weighing is far safer here than measuring.
- "Powdered sugar"In nineteenth-century usage this means granulated sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine or caster sugar is the closer match and dissolves properly into the beaten eggs.
- Beating the eggsYolks and whites are whipped separately because they are the only leavening — no butter, no soda, no baking powder. Beat the whites to soft peaks, beat the yolks with the sugar until pale and thick, then fold. Overworking after the flour goes in flattens the whole thing.
- The hour's restStanding an hour most likely lets the sugar dissolve in the egg before the flour goes in; the recipe does not say why. Cover the bowl.
- "Chop the mixture in very small cakes"This most likely means dropping small spoonfuls rather than cutting them, possibly a slip for "drop". Keep them very small, as the text says, and space them well.
- Tin platesUse a heavy baking sheet lined with parchment; bare tin plates would have needed some greasing, though the recipe does not say so. Modern thin sheets scorch the sugary bottoms, so double up the pans if yours are light.
- OvenNo temperature is given, and the recipe does not describe the oven. About 350F for 8 to 12 minutes, until the edges are just colouring and the centres set, is a reasonable modern starting point. These are small and go from pale to burnt quickly.
- FlavouringPeriod choices were lemon or orange zest, rose water, caraway seed, mace or a little brandy. A teaspoon of extract or the zest of one lemon suits this quantity.
- YieldRoughly five to six dozen small cakes. They keep well in a tin and were meant to; store them airtight the moment they are cold or they soften.
Butterless cakes were a standing category in Victorian household books, not a hardship measure — the pound of sugar beaten into egg does the work that butter and chemical leavening do in a modern cake, giving something between a macaroon and a Naples biscuit. Recipes of this shape descend from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English "biscuit" tradition, where eggs whipped with sugar and folded with flour produced a keeping cake that travelled and stored well. That mattered in a nineteenth-century kitchen: butter was seasonal and variable in quality, went rancid in warm weather, and a cake made without it could sit in a tin for weeks. The Home Cook Book, one of the compiled, subscription-style community cookbooks that spread through North America in the 1870s, is exactly the sort of volume where such a recipe circulates — contributed by a household cook, written for someone who already knew what her oven did, and printed with no temperature and no yield because none was thought necessary.