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Cake Making

The old-fashioned cook knew only two ways of raising her cake-one was with yeast, and the other was with the white of eggs and delicate beating. She knew to perfection all the arts of beating, stirring and folding known to the modern cooking school, but it is doubtful if she could have explained all these processes. She was too prone to call these processes a knack, and to explain all her methods by the remark that some were born cooks and some were not. The mystery is how she ever was capable of handing down the mass of culinary knowledge which she certainly possessed. Of baking powders she knew nothing. They had not been invented. She raised a few ginger cakes by use of salaratus and molasses for the early cake baker had no cream of tartar or fine soda. Salaratus was a coarse compound fit only for coarse cakes. The finest cakes like oldfashioned pound cake, and spongecake, were raised wholly with eggs, and baked in perfect ovens with a precision which has made modern housekeepers despair of success in their making. For plain cake they depended wholly upon the yeast.