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Delicate Cake
Take one and one-half cupfuls of white sugar, half a cupful of butter; rub these to a cream. Add half a cupful of sweet milk, in which dissolve half a teaspoonful of soda, and two cupfuls of flour, in which rub one teaspoonful of cream of tartar; add a little salt and flavor with vanilla or lemon. Beat the whites of four eggs to a stiff froth, and add last. Bake slowly an hour in a moderate oven. This recipe will make a two-quart basin loaf, and if the proportions are followed exactly, a beautiful cake will be the result.
A white butter cake leavened partly by beaten egg whites and partly by the soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing that preceded commercial baking powder. The proportions are sound; only the vessel and the oven need translating.
- The hinge: fold, don't beatThe whites go in last, and folding them through rather than stirring them in preserves the air they carry. The chemical leavening does some of the work, but the lightness the recipe promises depends on keeping that froth intact.
- Soda plus cream of tartarHalf a teaspoon of soda with one teaspoon of cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, in roughly the classic 1:2 ratio. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder sifted into the flour is the equivalent, though the original pairing acts faster and wants the pan in the oven promptly.
- Oven temperature"Moderate" is usually glossed today as around 350F, though period usage varied; "bake slowly" suggests pulling it down nearer 325F, which suits a full hour in a deep pan. A hotter oven risks doming and cracking the top before the centre sets.
- The two-quart basinA two-quart pudding basin is close to an 8-inch round cake pan of good depth, or a 9x5-inch loaf pan. Grease and flour it, or line the base with parchment.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or sour milk called for elsewhere in books of this era. Whole milk is the closest match.
- FlourTwo cupfuls of soft winter-wheat flour weighed less and had less gluten than modern all-purpose. Cake flour, or all-purpose with two tablespoons per cup swapped for cornstarch, gives the fine crumb the title advertises.
- Doneness and yieldTest at 55 minutes: a skewer should come out clean and the cake should just be shrinking from the pan side. One loaf, twelve to sixteen slices; it keeps a couple of days well wrapped.
Cakes built on egg whites alone were known through the later nineteenth century as white cake or silver cake, the counterpart to the gold or yellow cake made from the leftover yolks, and the two recipes were commonly printed together. "Delicate cake" was one of several interchangeable names for the type, describing the pale crumb and fine texture rather than any fixed formula. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar combination here marks the recipe as belonging to the decades when cooks mixed their own leavening from two separately purchased powders; branded baking powder was widely available by 1900 but home blending persisted, partly from habit and partly from long-running public suspicion about what commercial powders contained. The insistence that following the proportions exactly will guarantee results may perhaps be read as part of the period's turn toward baking by measurement rather than judgement, though that is interpretation rather than established fact.