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Mountain Cake
Fannie.
One cup of sugar, two eggs, one-half cup butter, onehalf cup milk or water, two cups of flour, one teaspoonful of cream of tartar, one-half teaspoonful of soda, and a little nutmeg.
A plain butter cake in the compressed style of the 1870s: an ingredient list, a contributor's name, and no further help. Everything about method, pan and oven is left to the cook.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given; domestic cookstoves of the period carried no thermometer and the oven was left to the cook's judgement. Bake at 350F: about 25 to 30 minutes in a single 8-inch round, or 40 to 50 minutes as a small loaf.
- Pan and yieldThe batter is small by modern standards, roughly one 8-inch layer or an 8x4-inch loaf, serving six to eight. If you want the tall stacked cake the name implies, double it and bake two or three thin layers.
- Cream of tartar and sodaThis is homemade baking powder. One teaspoon cream of tartar with half a teaspoon soda is roughly equivalent to about 2 teaspoons of modern baking powder, if you would rather substitute.
- Sift the leavening dryThe single instruction that matters. Cream of tartar and soda react the moment they meet liquid and give only one lift, so whisk both thoroughly into the flour, add it last, and get the cake into the oven at once.
- Butter and saltHalf a cup is one stick, and it should be softened and creamed with the sugar until light. Butter of the period was usually salted; with unsalted butter add a quarter teaspoon of salt.
- FlourHousehold flour of the 1870s was often softer and lower in protein than modern all-purpose, though this varied a good deal by region and mill. Cake flour, or all-purpose with two tablespoons per cup replaced by cornstarch, gives a closer crumb. Measure by spooning into the cup and levelling.
- Milk or waterThe choice is genuine, not a slip: water was the thriftier option and gives a lighter, plainer cake, milk a richer one. Either works with this quantity of butter.
- Nutmeg'A little' is left to the cook; a freshly grated quarter to half teaspoon suits this quantity of batter. It is the only flavouring in the cake, so grate it rather than using pre-ground.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the mid-1870s from recipes contributed by local women, with proceeds going to a charitable home, and it is one of the earliest and most influential American community cookbooks. The signed contributions are its signature feature: "Fannie" is a neighbour vouching for her own cake, and the terseness suggests a book written by experienced cooks for experienced cooks, who may have needed the proportions and little else. The pairing of cream of tartar with soda rather than a tin of baking powder places the recipe in the transitional decades when commercial powders existed but many households still mixed their own leavening at the moment of baking. The name is not fixed to any one formula; "mountain cake" is often said to have been applied to cakes built up in high layers, though this is an inference from the name rather than a documented convention, and the same title turns up on quite different batters in nineteenth-century collections.