The New Cakes of the Stove Era

Throughout the hearth era, the American fine cakes—black cake, pound cake, lady cake, golden cake, jelly cake, and the various sponge cakes—remained a thing apart from the cakes baked for tea, their ingredients still weighed rather than measured and their batters still raised exclusively by butter and/or eggs and strenuous beating, without the aid of chemical leavening. But times were changing. By 1850, most American households had forsaken the ancestral kitchen hearth in favor of the enclosed iron stove. Because the stove oven was much easier to manage than the fireplace oven and Dutch oven, cake-baking became more accessible to ordinary middle-class women. Middle-class women, however, found the hearth-era recipes for fine cakes too expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive for their means. Cookbook authors responded to their plight. By the late 1850s, cookbook authors outlined many thriftier, simplified recipes for fine cakes, the ingredients measured rather than weighed, butter and eggs reduced to modest quantities, the beating process shortened and streamlined, and, crucially, the batter raised with chemical leavening.