On Food and Cooking

Hard Work Well into the 20th century, risen
cakes were typified by the English pound cake
or French quatre quarts, “four quarters,”
which contain equal weights of the four major
ingredients: structure-building flour and eggs,
and structure-weakening butter and sugar.
These proportions push the flour’s starch and
the eggs’ proteins to their limit for holding
the fat and sugar in a tender, light scaffolding;
more butter or sugar collapses the scaffolding
and makes dense, heavy cakes. And because
cake batter must be filled with many small
bubbles without the help of yeasts, which
generate gas too slowly for the batter to hold
them, traditional cake making was hard work.
In 1857, Miss Leslie described a technique by
which the cook could beat eggs “for an hour
without fatigue” and then added: “But to stir
butter and sugar is the hardest part of cake
making. Have this done by a manservant.”
Fannie Farmer warned in 1896 that “A cake
can be made fine grained only with long