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Mountain Cake
One pound each of sugar and flour, one-half pound butter, six eggs, one cup rich milk, one teaspoonful soda, two of cream tartar, or one cup sour milk and an even teaspoonful salaratus. Flavor with lemon. Yolks and whites of eggs to be beaten separately.
A big butter cake of the pound-cake family, leavened enough to rise into layers. The proportions are given by weight, which makes it easier to scale than most recipes of its era.
- Weights to cupsOne pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; one pound of flour is about 4 cups, though a scale is far more reliable here. Half a pound of butter is two US sticks (8 oz).
- The two leavening routesThe recipe gives a choice: sweet milk with 1 tsp soda plus 2 tsp cream of tartar, or sour milk with 1 tsp saleratus alone. Soda and cream of tartar in those amounts are simply homemade baking powder, roughly equivalent to 4 tsp of modern double-acting powder.
- SaleratusSaleratus was originally potassium bicarbonate, later sold as sodium bicarbonate; treat it as baking soda. It needs an acid to work properly, which the sour milk supplies; used with sweet milk the unneutralised alkali can leave a soapy taste.
- Sour milkThis means naturally clabbered milk, not modern pasteurised milk that has gone off, which spoils by a different route. Buttermilk is the usual substitute, cup for cup.
- Method the recipe assumesCream butter and sugar, beat in the yolks, then add flour and milk alternately, and fold in the stiffly beaten whites last. Separating the eggs is one of the few steps the original spells out, and the beaten whites help keep a cake this heavy from being dense.
- Salt and flavouringNo salt is listed, which is common in recipes of this kind where the butter would likely have been salted; add 1/2 tsp if using unsalted butter. "Flavor with lemon" most likely means lemon extract, about 1 to 2 tsp, or the grated zest of a lemon.
- Oven350F. Layers of this batter run 25-30 minutes; a large tube or loaf pan will need 60-75 minutes, tested with a skewer.
- YieldThis is a very large cake — roughly 3 1/2 to 4 lb of batter. Expect three or four 9-inch layers, or a large tube pan. Halving it works cleanly since everything is in round numbers.
"Mountain cake" was one of many names nineteenth-century American cookbooks attached to tall, layered butter cakes, alongside snow cake, silver cake and lightning cake; the name is usually taken to refer to the height, though no source explains it. Its structure is close to a pound cake — equal weights of sugar and flour with butter and eggs — pushed upward by chemical leavening, and it sits at a moment when that leavening was changing hands. Cream of tartar and soda measured separately were the older domestic method; commercial baking powders were on sale in America from the mid-nineteenth century, and the alternative given here, sour milk with saleratus, is older still.