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Excellent Cake
Mrs. Joseph Robinson One pouud flour, one-half pound butter, three-fourths pound sugar, one-half pint of milk, five eggs, two tablespoonsful of brandy, one teaspoonful of soda and two of cream of tartar. Put half this quantity into a cake tin for a plain cake, then add one cup of currants to the remainder, which will make a nice variety of cake.
A pound-cake batter of the older sort, given as a list of weights with no method and no oven note at all. The one thing to get right is the leavening: soda plus cream of tartar is a homemade baking powder that starts working the moment the milk hits it, so the tins should be filled and in the oven promptly.
- The weights in cupsOne pound flour is about 3 1/2 cups (450 g); half a pound butter is 2 sticks (225 g); three-fourths pound sugar is roughly 1 2/3 cups (340 g). Weighing is faster and truer here than scooping.
- Half a pint of milkThe Home Cook Book was published in Toronto, so the pint may be imperial (20 fl oz), making half a pint 1 1/4 cups. If read as a US pint it is 1 cup. Start with 1 cup and add more only if the batter is stiffer than a thick dropping consistency.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda with two of cream of tartar is the period equivalent of about 4 teaspoons baking powder. Sift both through the flour rather than dumping them into the wet mixture, or you will get yellow-green streaks and a soapy taste.
- Method the recipe assumesNo method is given, but the ingredients imply the usual sequence: cream butter and sugar, beat in the eggs one at a time, add the brandy, then alternate the sifted flour mixture with the milk. The entry sets down proportions only, leaving the handling unstated.
- OvenNo temperature or time is given anywhere in the recipe. As a modern starting point, bake at 350F for 45 to 55 minutes in loaf tins or 30 to 35 in two 8-inch round pans, until a skewer comes out clean.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, not fresh red or black ones. Toss the cup of fruit with a spoonful of the measured flour before folding it in so it does not sink through the batter.
- YieldThe full quantity is a large batch — enough for two loaf tins, one plain and one fruited, as the recipe intends. Figure 16 to 20 slices in total.
- The brandyTwo tablespoons is flavouring, not preservation; the quantity is too small to affect how the cake keeps. Any decent brandy works.
This comes from The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children — generally counted as the first Canadian community fundraising cookbook, a genre borrowed from American charity and church compilations of the 1860s and 1870s. That explains the form of the entry: every recipe carries a contributor's name, and each was written for readers presumed to already know how to cream butter and judge an oven by hand, so only the proportions were thought worth setting down. The proportions themselves descend from true pound cake, equal weights of flour, butter, sugar and eggs beaten long enough to lift themselves; by the 1870s bakers had cut the butter and sugar back, added milk, and let soda and cream of tartar do the work that arm strength once did. Mrs. Robinson's trick of splitting the batter and currantsing half of it is thrift of a familiar kind — two cakes from one bowl and one heating of the oven.