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Nice Little Cakes-Cheap
Madame E. Pernet.
One-half cup butter, one-half cup sugar, one-half cup milk, three cups flour, two eggs, two spoonsful Cook's Friend baking powder. Mode-Beat the eggs, add the sugar, the batter well beaten, and half a nutmeg if the flavour be approved of, if not any other spice, or a few drops of essence of any kind; mix the baking powder well with the flour, and add by degrees to the mixture ; bake in small patty pans half an hour in a quick oven. They will be found very good if properly made.
A plain creamed-butter cake batter baked in small tins. The instructions telescope badly in places, so read the order of operations before starting.
- "The batter well beaten"Almost certainly a compositor's slip for the butter. Cream the half cup of butter with the sugar, beat in the eggs, then alternate flour and milk. Taken literally the line is nonsense, since no batter exists yet.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Montreal-made brand still sold in Canada; any double-acting baking powder substitutes directly. "Two spoonsful" is ambiguous, but teaspoons are the safer reading for three cups of flour — a tablespoon each would be far too much.
- Where the milk goesThe recipe never says. Add it alternately with the flour, beginning and ending with flour, to keep the batter from breaking.
- Patty pansSmall shallow tins for individual cakes or tartlets, roughly the size of a modern muffin cup but not as deep. A standard 12-cup muffin tin works; fill two-thirds full.
- A quick oven425–450F. That is too hot for half an hour with cakes this small — they will be dark outside and dry within. Small cakes of this size are done in 18–22 minutes at 375F; test with a skewer rather than trusting the clock.
- Half a nutmegHalf a whole nutmeg grated comes to roughly a teaspoon to a teaspoon and a half — assertive but in keeping with the period. Scale back to half a teaspoon if you want the butter to show through. "Essence" means an extract, so a teaspoon of vanilla or lemon serves as the alternative.
- YieldAbout 18 small cakes. They are lean by modern standards and stale quickly; eat within a day or two.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold to benefit the Hospital for Sick Children — generally credited as the first Canadian fundraising cookbook of its kind, and drawing on the American charity compilations then circulating. Its recipes carry contributors' names, as this one does. The reference to Cook's Friend baking powder, a Montreal-made brand, shows how far chemical leavening had spread in everyday home baking by the 1870s, and that a cookbook could assume a reader would recognise a proprietary tin on her own shelf. "Cheap" in the title is not apologetic — it is the selling point, half a cup of butter stretched across a batch of small cakes.