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White Part (Two cups white sugar)
Two cups white sugar, two-thirds cup butter, one-half cup, milk, the whites of five eggs, one teaspoon baking powder sifted in three tea cups flour, two teaspoons extract lemon.
This is the pale half of a two-batter cake — the companion "dark part" would have sat on the facing page or just below it — and like most ingredient-list recipes of the period it assumes the cook already knows the method. Read it as a creamed butter cake.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter and sugar until pale, add the milk and flour alternately, then fold in the whites beaten to soft peaks last. Beating the whites in as a liquid rather than folding them gives a dense, tough crumb.
- Teacups and cupsThe sugar and milk are given in cups, the flour in "tea cups." Teacup measures of the period were not standardised and are generally reckoned smaller than a modern measuring cup, so three tea cups of flour is probably less than 3 modern cups. Start at 2 1/2 cups and add only if the batter is slack.
- ButterTwo-thirds cup is about 10 tablespoons, or 150 g. Use unsalted and add a scant 1/4 teaspoon salt; butter of the period was commonly salted, which may be why the recipe lists no salt.
- LeaveningOne teaspoon of baking powder for three cups of flour is light by current standards, which run about a teaspoon per cup. The beaten whites carry much of the lift, so if you slacken the whites at all, raise the powder to 2 teaspoons.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F: about 25-30 minutes for two 8-inch layers, 55-65 minutes for a loaf or tube pan, testing with a skewer.
- Lemon extractTwo teaspoons is assertive by modern standards. If baking the white part alone, 1 teaspoon extract plus the zest of a lemon reads better to modern palates.
- YieldEnough for two 8-inch layers or one 9x5 loaf. Combined with a dark batter it makes a full marble cake serving twelve to sixteen.
- The five spare yolksThe dark half of such paired recipes often calls for whole eggs or yolks, which may well be the point of the arrangement. If you are making only the white part, keep the yolks for custard within a day.
Paired "white part" and "dark part" recipes were a fixture of American household cookbooks in the later nineteenth century, and are usually explained as a way of using up the yolks left over from a white batter. The two batters were dropped into the same pan in alternating spoonfuls and cut through once with a knife to make marble cake, or baked as separate layers and stacked -- the version sometimes called ribbon cake. The white batter's whiteness depended on refined white sugar and pale flour, both increasingly available and cheap by the end of the century, and on chemical leavening rather than yeast; a cake this pale would have been harder and more expensive to produce two generations earlier.