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Cup Cake (One cup of butter two cups)
One cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour, four eggs, a teaspoonful of soda dissolved in a cup of milk, two teaspoonsful of cream of tartar mixed into the flour; flavour with essence of any kind.
A ratio cake named for its measurements rather than its shape: one-two-three-four, the framework behind most nineteenth-century American butter cakes. The original assumes you know the method, so the gaps are all in technique rather than ingredients.
- The cup is not quite our cupNineteenth-century recipe cups varied, and some ran under 8 fl oz, but the point of this formula is proportion, not absolute volume. Use a standard 8 oz cup throughout and the balance holds: 8 oz butter, 14 oz sugar, about 13 oz flour.
- Method, which is omittedCream the butter and sugar until pale and light, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the cream-of-tartar flour and the soda milk alternately in two or three additions. The leavening starts working the moment the acid and soda meet in the batter, so get it into the pan promptly.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis is baking powder assembled in place he 1:2 ratio of soda to cream of tartar is the classic one. Modern double-acting baking powder is not a straight swap here; if you must substitute, about 4 teaspoons of baking powder sifted into the flour, with plain milk, is the nearest equivalent.
- Essence of any kindPeriod essences were lemon, vanilla, rose, bitter almond or nutmeg. A teaspoon of extract is the right order of magnitude for this quantity of batter. Skip almond essence marketed as bitter almond flavouring unless it is a modern benzaldehyde product.
- Pan and ovenThe recipe gives no oven direction; bake at 350F. The batter fills two 9-inch layer tins (25-30 minutes), a 9x13 pan (about 35 minutes), or a tube pan (50-60 minutes). It is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back.
- YieldRoughly 3 lb of batter -- about 12 generous servings, or two dozen cupcakes at 18-20 minutes.
- Texture to expectWith no liquid beyond one cup of milk and no separated whites, this is a firm, close-grained cake rather than a light sponge. It keeps well for several days and takes a boiled or butter icing better than it takes whipped cream.
The one-two-three-four cake — a cup of butter, two of sugar, three of flour, four eggs — was the workhorse of American home baking through the nineteenth century, and "cup cake" originally meant a cake measured in cups rather than weighed on scales. That shift matters: British cookery of the same period is often said to have weighed ingredients, sometimes against eggs (the pound cake takes its name from a pound of each), while American cooks standardised on the teacup and later the measuring cup. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing here dates the recipe to the window after chemical leavening reached ordinary households but before commercial baking powder had displaced the two-jar system. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in the 1870s from contributions by local women, is full of exactly this kind of shorthand — a formula short enough to memorise, written for someone who already knew how a cake was mixed.