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Cheap and Good Cake
Ada King.
One cup of sugar, one-fourth cup of butter, three-fourths cup water cold, one and three-fourths cup of flour, whites of two eggs, one teaspoon of lemon, Cook's Friend baking powder used.
A plain white economy cake given as a list of quantities with no method, no pan and no oven heat — the assumption being that any cook of the day knew what to do with butter, sugar and beaten whites. Here is what the original leaves out.
- The missing baking powderThe recipe names the brand but not the amount. For 1¾ cups of flour, about 1½ to 2 teaspoons of baking powder follows the usual modern proportion of roughly a teaspoon per cup; sift it through the flour rather than adding it to the wet mixture.
- Cook's FriendA Canadian baking powder brand, generally traced to the McLaren firm in Montreal. Any modern double-acting baking powder replaces it directly.
- One teaspoon of lemonAlmost certainly lemon extract rather than juice or zest, since the quantity is given in teaspoons. A teaspoon of extract is assertive by current standards; ½ to 1 teaspoon suits most palates, or use the grated zest of one lemon instead.
- Water, not milkThe cold water is the economy in "cheap and good." It gives a lighter, drier, more neutral crumb than milk would, and the cake goes stale faster — it is best eaten the day it is baked.
- MethodCream the butter and sugar, add the water alternately with the sifted flour and baking powder, stir in the extract, then fold in the whites beaten to soft peaks last. Overworking after the whites go in flattens it.
- Pan and ovenThe batter fits an 8-inch round or a small loaf tin, greased and floured. The original gives no oven heat; 350F for 30 to 35 minutes suits a cake this size, until a skewer comes out clean.
- Only a quarter cup of butterThat is 4 tablespoons for nearly two cups of flour, which is lean for a cake. Expect something closer to a tea cake or a base for stewed fruit than a rich layer cake.
- YieldOne small single-layer cake, eight modest servings. The leftover two yolks will keep a day or two covered in the refrigerator for a custard.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in the 1870s by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, which is why so many of its recipes carry a contributor's name — Ada King's here — rather than a house style. Cakes of this kind, built on water instead of milk and whites instead of whole eggs, were a standing fixture of nineteenth-century charitable cookbooks: cheap enough for a weekday, pale and fine enough to pass at a tea table. The naming of a commercial baking powder in the text is itself a period marker. Chemical leavening had only recently displaced yeast and hand-beaten eggs in the domestic cake, and brand loyalty was strong enough that a contributor thought it worth specifying — a small piece of advertising folded into a neighbour's recipe.