Yellow Cake
One coffee-cup sugar, two coffee-cups flour, one-half coffee-cup butter, scant, one-half coffee cup sour milk, one teaspoon soda, flavor with vanilla, yolks of four eggs. These cakes may be used for layer cakes and put jelly or cocoanut frosting between if preferred.
A yolk-only butter cake of the sort that shared a page with "white cake" so a cook could use up both halves of four eggs. The original gives no method, no pan and no oven, so those are the gaps to fill.
- The coffee-cupA 19th-century coffee cup is usually taken as a full 8-oz cup, though some household books treat it as nearer 3/4 cup. Whichever you choose, use the same vessel throughout: the recipe is a ratio of 1 sugar : 2 flour : 1/2 butter : 1/2 sour milk, and it holds together at either scale.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Buttermilk is the closest supermarket stand-in; milk clabbered with a teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar works but is thinner and less acidic.
- The soda is generousA full teaspoon of soda against only half a cup of sour milk leaves more alkali than the acid can neutralise, which reads as a soapy, faintly metallic aftertaste and darkens the crumb. Half a teaspoon suits modern cultured buttermilk better, or keep the full teaspoon and use a full cup of buttermilk with a little extra flour.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter and sugar until pale, beat in the yolks one at a time, then add the flour and the sour milk alternately, with the soda dissolved in the milk and stirred in last. Get it into the pans as soon as the soda goes in.
- Oven350F. Layers in two 8-inch pans take 20 to 25 minutes; a single 8-inch square takes 30 to 35. The cake is done when it springs back and pulls slightly from the sides.
- Flavouring"Flavor with vanilla" meant a teaspoon or so of extract. Strengths varied a good deal, so start at one teaspoon rather than a tablespoon.
- Yield and fillingTwo thin 8-inch layers, serving eight to ten. The suggested fillings are what they sound like: a plain fruit jelly beaten smooth, or a boiled or butter frosting with grated coconut folded through.
- The four whitesNothing here uses them. They keep three days refrigerated or freeze well, and were traditionally spent on a white or silver cake, meringues, or a boiled icing for this very cake.
Yellow cake and white cake are a matched pair in American household cookery, and their logic is thrift rather than fashion: eggs were separated for one, and the other existed so the remaining halves were not wasted. The colour comes entirely from four yolks, and farm eggs of the period are generally said to have had deeper yolks than most commercially produced eggs today. Soda-and-sour-milk leavening was common from the spread of saleratus as a kitchen staple through the decades in which baking powder came into general use, and it persisted well alongside baking powder, so it dates the recipe only loosely.