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Marble Cake, White
One and one half cups sugar, one-half cup butter, one-half cup sweet milk, two and one-half cups flour, one and one-half teaspoons baking powder, whites of four eggs.
This is a formula rather than a method: the book assumes the cook knows how to cream, fold and bake a plain cake, and that this white batter is only half the job. A companion dark batter is dropped in alternately to make the marbling.
- It is half a recipeWhite marble cake batter was normally paired with a dark one, often the same base with yolks, molasses or brown sugar and spices such as cinnamon, clove and nutmeg. The usual handling is to spoon the two alternately into the pan and cut through once or twice with a knife; more than that and you get muddy brown cake rather than marbling.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabbered milk that appears in soda-raised recipes. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- Method the book omitsCream the butter with the sugar until pale, add flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk, then fold in the four whites beaten to soft peaks last. Folding rather than stirring is what keeps the crumb light, since the whites are the only aeration beyond the powder.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. For a modern reconstruction, bake at about 350F: a loaf or tube pan takes roughly 45 to 55 minutes, two 8-inch layers about 25 to 30.
- Baking powderOne and a half teaspoons to two and a half cups of flour is on the low side by modern standards, where two teaspoons per two cups is common. Period powders were often single-acting, and in a recipe like this the beaten whites carry much of the aeration.
- Butter and saltHalf a cup is one stick. The recipe calls for no salt, as many period recipes do not, butter of the day usually being salted; add a quarter teaspoon if using unsalted.
- YieldAbout one 9-inch tube cake or two 8-inch layers, roughly ten to twelve servings, once combined with an equal quantity of dark batter.
Marble cake belongs to the late nineteenth-century American parlour table. The technique is generally traced to German baking traditions carried to America, where Marmorkuchen streaked light and dark batter together; American books adapted it to the chemically leavened butter cakes that baking powder had made routine after the 1860s. Splitting the eggs was economical as much as decorative: the whites went into the white batter and the yolks into the dark, so nothing was wasted.