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Cream Cake
Mamie Nevett.
Two eggs, one cup of sugar, one cup of cream, two cups of flour, one teaspoonful of cream of tartar, and one Two eggs, one cup of sugar, one cup of cream, two teaspoonful of soda.
The text has been garbled in printing — the ingredient list restarts partway through — but the intended recipe is a plain two-egg cream cake: 2 eggs, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup cream, 2 cups flour, 1 teaspoon cream of tartar, 1 teaspoon soda. No mixing method, pan, oven heat or time is given, which was normal for a subscription cookbook written for cooks who already knew the form.
- The duplicated lineRead only the first pass through the ingredients. The repeated "Two eggs, one cup of sugar, one cup of cream, two..." is a typesetting error, not a second addition.
- Cream means heavy creamCream means rich cream -- Nineteenth-century "cream" skimmed from the top of the pan varied a good deal in richness, but was generally closer to what we sell as heavy or whipping cream than to light cream, and here it supplies all the fat in the cake — there is no butter or oil. Half-and-half or light cream will give a drier, tougher crumb.
- The leavening is off balanceCream of tartar and soda neutralise at about two parts tartar to one part soda. Equal teaspoons leave excess soda, which tastes soapy and yellows the crumb. A cook following this today would use 1 teaspoon soda to 2 teaspoons cream of tartar, or simply 2 teaspoons baking powder in place of both.
- Salt and flavouringNeither is mentioned, as was common. A quarter teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of vanilla or a little grated lemon rind bring the cake up to modern expectations.
- MixingBeat the eggs and sugar until pale and thick, stir in the cream, then fold in the flour sifted with the raising agents. Once soda and acid are wetted the reaction starts, so get the batter into the pan and the oven without delay.
- Oven and panThis quantity fits one 8-inch round or square tin, or a small loaf. No oven heat or time is given; bake at 350F for about 25 to 30 minutes in a layer, longer in a loaf, until a skewer comes out clean.
- YieldRoughly eight to ten small slices. Cakes of this type were often baked in two thin layers and sandwiched with jam or a custard filling, as well as served plain.
Cream cake in a book like this means a cake made with cream, not one filled with it — a useful recipe on a farm or in any household with its own milk, where cream was more abundant than butter that had to be worked and salted. Recipes of this shape, built on a cup-and-spoon count rather than weights, spread through American community cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century, each contribution signed by the woman who supplied it; here it is Mamie Nevett. The pairing of cream of tartar with soda points to a period when many cooks still bought the two chemicals separately, though recipes calling for the pair continued to appear well after commercial baking powder combined them in a single tin.