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Cream Cakes
Six eggs, beaten separately, a-half pint of sour cream, one pint of sweet milk, one and one-half teaspoons of Cook's Friend baking powder, flour enough to make a thin batter; bake in cups..
A thin, egg-heavy batter baked in cups — closer to a popover or a gem than to a layer cake. The original assumes a cook who knows what a batter should look like and an oven she judges by hand, so the gaps are worth filling.
- The hinge: keep the batter thin"Flour enough to make a thin batter" means pouring consistency, roughly that of heavy cream — not a spoonable cake batter. With six eggs and three cups of liquid, expect somewhere in the region of 3 to 4 cups of flour; add it gradually and stop while the batter still runs off the spoon in a stream. Too much flour and the cakes sit heavy instead of puffing.
- Volumes, and a caveatA half pint of sour cream is one cup, a pint of sweet milk two cups. The Home Cook Book is Canadian, so the pints may be imperial (20 fl oz) rather than US (16); if the batter reads thick, that is why, and a splash more milk corrects it.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA widely advertised Canadian brand of the period, and one that still appears on shelves in Canada. Any standard double-acting baking powder works; 1½ teaspoons is modest, because most of the lift here comes from the beaten eggs.
- Eggs beaten separatelyYolks go in with the cream and milk; the whites are beaten to soft peaks and folded in last, after the flour. Fold gently and bake at once — the aeration is the structure of the cake, and it starts collapsing as soon as it stands.
- Sour creamNineteenth-century sour cream was naturally soured raw cream, thinner and sharper than the cultured product sold today. Modern full-fat sour cream is fine; thin it with a tablespoon or two of milk if it is very stiff. Note there is no soda added in the recipe, so the acidity is largely there for flavour and tenderness, though it will react to some extent with the bicarbonate in the baking powder.
- "Bake in cups"Small earthenware or tin cups, or a gem pan — the modern equivalent is a muffin tin or individual popover cups, well greased and filled about two-thirds. Cast iron or heavy tins preheated in the oven give the best rise.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. For a thin egg batter in cups, a quick oven — 400 to 425F — for 20 to 25 minutes, without opening the door for the first 15 minutes. They are done when browned, firm and hollow-sounding.
- Yield and servingEnough batter for roughly 18 to 24 standard muffin cups. Serve hot from the oven with butter and preserves; like popovers, they deflate and toughen as they cool.
Despite the name, these are not the cream-filled choux buns a modern reader might expect — here the name refers to cakes made with cream, in this case soured cream, which was a standing byproduct of any household that skimmed its own milk. The Home Cook Book was published in Toronto in 1877, compiled from contributions by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada," with proceeds going to the Hospital for Sick Children; it is generally credited as the first major Canadian fundraising cookbook, and it set the pattern for hundreds of church and charity compilations that followed. The naming of a commercial brand in the ingredient list — Cook's Friend baking powder, a Canadian product heavily advertised at the time — is characteristic of the genre, where the manufacturers who bought advertising space in the back pages often turned up in the recipes as well.