Plain Cake
1½ cups flour (pastry) 2 teaspoons baking powder ¼ cup milk 1-21-2 teaspoon flavoring Cream the butter, add sugar gradually. Separate white and yolks of egg. Beat yolks till thick and lemon colored, add to creamed butter and sugar. Sift together remaining dry ingredients. Add these alternately with milk, beating thoroughly. Flavor with vanilla. Beat egg whites till stiff and fold these into batter. Bake in a moderate oven at a temperature of 350°F. in a loaf pan for about 45 minutes. ½ cup shortening ½ cup brown sugar 1 eggs cup water
The ingredient list in this entry has been scrambled by the typesetter — half of it trails after the method — so read it as two columns recombined before you start. The procedure itself is a standard creamed butter cake and works as written.
- Reassemble the ingredients firstWorking from the method, the list is: ½ cup shortening (or butter), 1 cup brown sugar, 3 eggs, 1½ cups pastry flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, ½ cup milk, and flavoring. The stray "cup water" at the end has no role in the method and appears to be a fragment from an adjacent recipe; ignore it.
- Butter or shorteningThe list says shortening, the method says butter. Either works — butter gives better flavor, vegetable shortening a slightly higher, softer crumb. Have it at cool room temperature, around 65°F, or it will not cream properly with the sugar.
- The flavoring quantity is unreadableThe line still reads "1-21-2 teaspoon flavoring," which gives no usable amount. One to two teaspoons of vanilla suits a batter of this size.
- Pastry flourPastry flour is softer than all-purpose, roughly 8-9% protein, and gives the tender crumb this cake wants. If you only have all-purpose, replace two tablespoons of each cup with cornstarch, or use cake flour and add a tablespoon back per cup.
- No salt is listedIf you are using unsalted butter or shortening, add ¼ teaspoon of salt to the sifted dry ingredients.
- Brown sugarIt gives a tan crumb and a faint molasses note. Pack it when measuring, and break up any lumps before creaming, since they will not dissolve later.
- Folding the whitesThe whites are the only lift beyond the baking powder. Beat them to soft-firm peaks, not dry, and fold in two additions with a spatula, cutting down and turning over rather than stirring. Overworking here is the difference between a light loaf and a dense one.
- Pan and donenessThe recipe says only "loaf pan"; an 8x4 or 9x5 pan, greased and lined with parchment, will serve. Forty-five minutes at 350°F is about right, but start testing at 40 -- a skewer should come out with a few dry crumbs. Cool ten minutes in the pan before turning out.
- YieldOne loaf, about 10 to 12 slices. It keeps three or four days wrapped and is better on the second day.
"Plain cake" is a category rather than a specific recipe: the everyday butter cake kept in the tin for family tea, as distinguished from the layered, iced, and fruited cakes that were made for company. Recipes like this one belong to the period when chemical leavening had become reliable and cheap, making it a weeknight proposition rather than an afternoon's beating. The Metropolitan Cook Book was issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and distributed free to policyholders, part of a broader corporate interest in domestic economy and nutrition; its recipes lean deliberately toward the plain, the cheap, and the reliably reproducible, which is why the whole thing fits in a single short paragraph.