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Corn Starch Loaf Cake
2/3 cup Cottolene. 2 cups fine sugar. 1 cup milk. 1 cup corn starch. 2 cups flour.
First Sunday 1½ tablespoons baking powder.
Whites 5 eggs beaten stiff. ½ teaspoon salt. 1 teaspoon vanilla.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene, add sugar gradually, stirring constantly. Mix and sift flour, corn starch, baking powder and salt; add alternately to first mixture with milk, add vanilla, then cut and fold in whites of eggs. Turn mixture into two well-greased, brick-shaped bread pans and bake forty-five minutes in a moderate oven. Spread with Maple Frosting (see Page 103) and stick with blanched and shredded almonds slightly toasted.
A white loaf cake of the cornstarch type, tender-crumbed and leavened partly by stiff egg whites. Two things need attention before you start: the shortening is a discontinued product, and the baking powder quantity has been mangled in the original printing.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, discontinued long ago. Use the same volume of vegetable shortening, or unsalted butter if you want more flavour — butter gives a slightly denser, less cottony crumb.
- The baking powder line is corrupt"First Sunday 1/2 tablespoons baking powder" is a typesetting collision between the running head and the ingredient. Comparable cornstarch loaf cakes of the period use about 2½ teaspoons for three cups of dry ingredients, but the original figure here cannot be recovered with certainty.
- Salt1½ teaspoons is high for a white cake, and was written for unsalted shortening. If you use salted butter, cut it back to about ½ teaspoon.
- Moderate oven350°F. At that temperature 45 minutes is about right for two loaves; test with a skewer at 40 minutes, since a cake this pale gives little colour warning before it dries out.
- Brick-shaped bread pansRoughly equivalent to modern 9x5-inch loaf pans, though period bread pans varied in size. Grease well and, if you like, line the base — the high sugar content makes this batter inclined to stick.
- CornstarchCalled corn flour in Britain. It replaces a third of the wheat flour to cut gluten, which is the whole point of the cake: the crumb should be short and fine rather than springy.
- Cut and foldThe whites carry a real share of the lift. Fold them in with a spatula in as few strokes as will incorporate them, and get the batter into the pans at once.
- YieldTwo loaves, roughly 10 to 12 slices each. The maple frosting and toasted almonds on top are worth the trouble — unfrosted, the cake is plain to the point of austerity.
52 Sunday Dinners was published in 1913 by the N. K. Fairbank Company, makers of Cottolene, and it is an advertisement as much as a cookbook: recipes calling for fat call for Cottolene by name. Cottonseed oil, compounded with beef suet, was marketed hard in the decades around 1900 as a cleaner, cheaper alternative to lard, and cookbooks distributed at low cost or free were one of the main ways manufacturers taught cooks to use it. The cake itself belongs to a genre popular from the 1880s onward, in which cornstarch was substituted for part of the flour to produce an unusually fine, tender crumb ar very sosoft cakes then admired in commercial bakeries.