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Cup Cake (II)
Mrs. Arthurs.
One cup butter, two cups sugar, three cups flour, four eggs, cup milk, three teaspoonsful Cook's Friend.
This is the classic 1-2-3-4 cake, written out in the shorthand of a cook who assumed the reader already knew what to do with it. Everything except the ingredient list has to be supplied.
- Cook's Friend is baking powderMcLaren's Cook's Friend was a widely sold Canadian brand of baking powder. Use three level teaspoons of ordinary double-acting baking powder, which is about the standard modern proportion for three cups of flour.
- The cup is not quite our cupStandardised measuring cups postdate this book; a household cup in the 1870s was near enough to eight fluid ounces. Treat it as 8 oz and the proportions hold, since the recipe is built on ratio rather than absolute quantity.
- FlourOntario flour of the period was generally softer and lower in protein than modern all-purpose, which gives a firmer crumb; substituting cake flour for one of the three cups may bring it closer to the intended texture.
- Butter and saltThe butter was most likely salted, and the recipe adds no salt of its own. If using unsalted butter, add about half a teaspoon of salt with the flour.
- The method the recipe omitsCream the butter and sugar until pale, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the flour and baking powder alternately with the milk, beginning and ending with flour. Overmixing after the flour goes in is the one thing that will spoil it.
- Pan and ovenBake at 350F. The batter fills a 10-inch tube pan (55-65 minutes), three 9-inch rounds (25-30 minutes), or about 24 cupcake cases (18-20 minutes).
- Yield and servingA large cake serving 12 to 16. It is a plain cake meant to be eaten with tea, and takes flavouring well: a teaspoon of vanilla, grated lemon rind, or a cup of currants tossed in flour.
"Cup cake" here has nothing to do with baking in paper cases; it means a cake measured by the cupful rather than weighed on scales, and the one-two-three-four sequence of butter, sugar, flour and eggs made it easy to recite from memory in a kitchen that might not own a balance. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, is a subscription cookbook of exactly this kind: hundreds of contributions signed with a name, each assuming the reader was already a cook. The reference to Cook's Friend, a brand sold over a long span, places the recipe more than it dates it. Chemical leavening had only become a reliable household staple in the third quarter of the century, and contributors named their preferred brand the way one might now name a brand of yeast, which is why the recipe can afford to be three lines long.