FROM THE OLD COOKBOOKS
Little cakes are older than the paper case.
The recipes survive in cookbooks you can still read today. They show two ideas sharing one name: cakes baked in cups, and cakes measured with them.
1796 small cups, big history
THE SHORT ANSWER
Old recipes tell you how a cake was measured
and what it was baked in. Both shaped the little cake.
1796
Amelia Simmons's American Cookery gives a light cake to bake in small cups, with butter, sugar and flour measured by the pound.
Compare the recipes1832
Eliza Leslie's Cup Cake lists two large tea-cups of molasses, sugar and butter, then bakes the mixture in small buttered tins.
See the numbers1910
Fannie Farmer's cookbook says a cupful is measured level, smoothed with a knife, and bakes its Cup Cakes in individual tins.
Read them yourselfA QUICK RECIPE CHECK
Pick a historic recipe for small cakes to see how its ingredients were measured. The bar shows how much of the recipe relies on cups rather than weights.
Taken from the recipe texts as printed in the Project Gutenberg editions listed in the sources.
TWO NUMBERS WORTH KNOWING
One date for the oldest recipe here,
one number for the size of the book it is in.
1796
Year of a light cake to bake in small cups
Amelia Simmons's American Cookery, published that year, prints the recipe between a pound cake and a Shrewsbury cake.
THE FIRST RECIPE · 1796
47 pages
Pages in the first edition
Smithsonian magazine describes American Cookery as the first cookbook by an American published in the United States, with 47 pages in its first edition.
THE BOOK · SMITHSONIAN
Smithsonian magazine reports that the Library of Congress named American Cookery one of 88 Books That Shaped America, and that Simmons used the word cookies where British books said small cakes or biscuits.
FOUR WAYS TO EXPLORE
All four cookbooks are free to read online. These are ways to look at them with a baker's eye.
Pounds and ounces point to weighing; tea-cups and cupfuls point to measuring by volume.
Small cups, small tins, buttered pans or individual tins: the container gave many little cakes their name.
Simmons gives no method for her small-cup cake. Later books, like Beeton's, spell out mixing and timing.
Simmons uses emptins, Beeton carbonate of soda and Farmer baking powder, so the same small cake rose in different ways.
THE BRITISH SIDE
Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, published in parts from 1859 and as a bound book in 1861, has Queen-cakes made with flour, butter, sugar, eggs, cream and currants.
Her method is careful: cream the butter, beat the paste for 10 minutes, put it into small buttered pans and bake for a quarter to half an hour. The average cost is given as 1s. 9d.
Questions
The 1796 American Cookery by Amelia Simmons has a recipe titled a light cake to bake in small cups, made with sugar, butter, flour, wine, rose water, emptins, spices and currants.
In these books the word points two ways: Simmons bakes her cake in small cups, while Leslie's 1832 Cup Cake measures its ingredients in tea-cups and bakes them in small tins.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, first copyrighted in 1896, tells cooks that a cupful is measured level by filling it and smoothing it with a knife.
Mrs Beeton's 1861 book includes Queen-cakes: weighed flour, butter, sugar and currants with eggs, cream and soda, baked in small buttered pans.
Yes. All four are available as free texts from Project Gutenberg, and the links are in the sources below.
Sources
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