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Ice Cream Cake
Two cups pulverized or granulated sugar, three fourths cup of butter, one cup sweet milk, one cup corn starch, two cups flour, whites of seven eggs, beaten to a stiff froth, two teaspoons cream tartar, one teaspoon soda, a little salt. Mix cream tartar with the flour and dissolve the soda in a tablespoon of hot water.
A white butter cake of the cream-of-tartar-and-soda school, written for a cook who already knew how to fill a pan and judge a fire. Everything after the mixing is left to you.
- No baking directions at allThe original stops at the mixing. Bake in two or three greased and floured 9-inch round pans at 350F, 25-30 minutes, or in a tube pan at 350F for 45-55 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean and the cake springs back.
- The leavening is homemade baking powderTwo teaspoons cream of tartar sifted with the flour plus one teaspoon soda slaked in hot water is the period equivalent of roughly four teaspoons of baking powder, though it acts only once rather than twice. Because the acid and base meet all at once in the batter, get it into the oven promptly.
- Pulverized sugarIn this period that means granulated sugar ground finer, not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Use granulated, or pulse it briefly in a processor if you want it to cream more smoothly with the butter.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabbered milk called for in soda breads. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- Corn starch in the flourOne cup cornstarch to two cups flour lowers the protein sharply and gives the fine, close, pale crumb the recipe is after. Sift the cornstarch, flour, cream of tartar and salt together at least twice.
- Method the recipe assumesCream the butter and sugar, add the milk and dry ingredients alternately, stir in the dissolved soda, then fold in the stiffly beaten whites last and gently. Seven large whites are roughly 210 g, a scant cup.
- YieldA large cake, about 10-12 servings. Nineteenth-century recipes of this type were commonly finished with a plain white boiled icing or a thin water icing.
Despite the name, no ice cream is involved. "Ice cream cake" was a common nineteenth-century title for a white cake made with egg whites only and covered in white icing; the origin of the name is not documented, though it is often linked to the pale, cold-looking surface and fine texture rather than to any frozen component. The same batter turns up elsewhere as silver cake, snow cake or cornstarch cake. Cornstarch became cheap and widely available in American kitchens in the second half of the century, and cookbooks of the 1870s onward frequently use it to soften household flour toward something closer to the delicate crumb of a bakery cake.