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Mountain Cake (II)
M. R. Beard.
One-half cup of sugar, one-half cup of butter, one cup of milk, two and one-fourth cups of flour one teaspoonful soda, two teaspoonsful of cream of tartar, two eggs, a little nutmeg.
A bare ingredient list in the style of its day: no method, no pan, no oven, no time. What follows fills the gaps, in the order they matter.
- Leavening is the hingeOne teaspoon soda with two teaspoons cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, and it starts working the moment the milk hits it. Sift the cream of tartar and soda through the flour, add it last, and get the batter into the oven at once; there is no double-acting reserve to rescue a batter left standing.
- Assumed methodPeriod practice for a list in this order is to cream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the flour mixture and milk alternately, finishing with the grated nutmeg. Nothing in the wording suggests otherwise.
- OvenNo temperature is given; this list leaves it out entirely. A cake of this size suggests a moderate oven, around 350F, for roughly 30 to 35 minutes in two 8-inch layers or 40 to 45 in a single deep pan.
- Cup measuresNineteenth-century American cups run close to the modern 8 fluid ounces, but flour was scooped rather than spooned and its weight varied a good deal; two and one-quarter cups may land anywhere from about 280 to 330 g. Expect a batter on the loose side.
- A restrained sweetnessHalf a cup of sugar to two and a quarter cups of flour is much less sugar than a modern layer cake. The result is closer to a plain tea cake, which is why nutmeg carries so much of the flavor. Such plain batters were often iced or filled, though this recipe says nothing about it.
- Butter and saltHalf a cup is one stick, 4 oz. No salt is called for separately, and butter of the period was commonly salted; if you use unsalted butter, add a quarter teaspoon of salt with the flour.
- Nutmeg"A little" means freshly grated from a whole nutmeg, which is far more aromatic than pre-ground. A quarter teaspoon is enough to be noticed in a cake this plain.
- YieldAbout eight to ten servings, or two thin 8-inch layers.
The Home Cook Book was a subscription cookbook of the 1870s, assembled from contributions by named local women and sold to raise money for charity, which is why so many of its entries are signed only briefly and abbreviated to the point of shorthand. Contributors were writing for neighbors who already knew how a cup cake was made, so the method was left out as self-evident. The name "Mountain cake" is one of the many decorative titles attached to plain cup-cake batters in this period, most often said to describe a tall stacked or high-domed cake rather than any regional origin. The pairing of saleratus, or soda, with cream of tartar was the standard chemical leavening in home kitchens before commercial baking powder became cheap and reliable, and recipes kept specifying the two separately well after tins of the ready-mixed product were on grocers' shelves.