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Southern Reliable Cake
Six eggs, half a pound of butter, one pound and one ounce of flour, one pound of sugar, half pint of milk, two even teaspoonfuls of baking powder. Cream the butter and sugar, add the eggs well beaten, then the milk, flour and the powder sifted into the flour. Season with lemon or vanilla. Bake in layers in loaf or in cups.
A pound-cake descendant loosened with milk and baking powder, written for a cook who knew her own oven. The weights are the reliable part; everything else has to be supplied.
- The weights in cupsHalf a pound of butter is two sticks; one pound of sugar is about 2¼ cups granulated; one pound one ounce of flour is roughly 3¾ cups unsifted or about 4¼ cups sifted all-purpose, depending on how it is measured. If you have a scale, use the weights as given — they are more accurate than any cup conversion.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup in US measure. If you are working from a British edition of the period, a pint is 20 fl oz and the half-pint would be 1¼ cups; this book is American, so use one cup.
- No oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe offers no oven description at all; heat was judged by hand and experience. Bake at 350F: about 25 minutes for two or three 9-inch layers, 20 minutes for cupcakes, and 60 to 75 minutes for a loaf or tube pan, testing with a skewer.
- Baking powder strengthTwo teaspoons for nearly four cups of flour is lean by modern standards, but six eggs are doing much of the lifting. Beat the eggs until pale and thick rather than merely broken up, or the crumb will be dense.
- Order of mixingThe instruction to add milk, then flour, gives a batter that can break. Alternate the flour mixture and the milk in three or four additions, beginning and ending with flour, and stop as soon as the last streaks disappear.
- Seasoning quantities"Season with lemon or vanilla" means about 2 teaspoons vanilla extract, or the grated zest of one lemon plus a teaspoon of lemon extract.
- Pan preparation and yieldGrease and flour or line the pans; this batter has enough sugar to stick badly. It makes roughly three 9-inch layers, one large tube cake, or about two dozen to 30 cupcakes.
The proportions here — half a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of flour, six eggs — are a pound cake stretched with milk and lifted with chemical leavening, the transitional form that spread as commercial baking powders became cheap and widely available in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. "Reliable" turns up as a cake name in American household and community cookbooks of the period, though what the word was meant to promise is not something the recipe itself tells us. The "Southern" tag likewise carries no documented regional origin here.