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Delicate Cake
Three cups flour, two of sugar, three-fourths cup sweet milk, whites of six eggs, half cup butter, tea-spoon cream tartar, half tea-spoon of soda. Flavor with lemon. Good and easily made.- Miss Mary E. Miller..
A plain white cake in the 1870s idiom: the book assumes you know the creaming order and the state of your own stove, so both have to be supplied. Nothing here is difficult, but the method is entirely implied.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter with the sugar, add the milk alternately with the flour (sifted with the cream of tartar and soda), then fold in the whites beaten to soft, not stiff, peaks. Folding the whites in last is what makes it "delicate"; stirred in, the cake turns dense.
- LeaveningA teaspoon of cream of tartar with half a teaspoon of soda is the period substitute for baking powder, and the proportion is roughly right. If you use baking powder instead, about 2 teaspoons replaces the pair, but do not use both.
- Sweet milkPlain unsoured whole milk. The distinction mattered when soured milk was a common baking ingredient in its own right, paired with soda; here you want fresh.
- Oven350F. Buckeye Cookery was written for wood ranges tested by hand and flour-browning, so no temperature appears. Around 30 to 35 minutes in two 9-inch layers, 45 to 55 in a tube or loaf pan.
- Pan and yieldThe batter is large: it fills two 9-inch rounds or one 10-inch tube pan and serves 10 to 12. Butter and flour the pan well; there is no parchment in the original and the batter is lean enough to stick.
- Flavoring with lemonPeriod "flavor with lemon" often meant lemon extract, about a teaspoon. Zest from one lemon works and tastes better, but rub it into the sugar first so the oil disperses.
- Butter and saltHalf a cup is one stick. The recipe calls for no salt, as many period cake receipts do not, and the butter of the day was commonly salted; with modern unsalted butter add about half a teaspoon.
- The six yolksNothing in the recipe uses them. Households of the period paired a white cake with a gold cake, a custard or mayonnaise on the same day; refrigerate and use them within a day or two.
White cakes multiplied in American cookbooks from the 1850s onward for two linked reasons: chemical leavening became cheap and reliable, and finely bolted white flour became widely available, so a pale, tender crumb turned into something a middle-class cook could demonstrate. Names like "Delicate Cake," "Silver Cake," "Snow Cake" and "Lady Cake" all describe roughly this formula, egg whites only, and their companion "Gold" cakes existed largely to use up the yolks. The fundraising volume in this line was the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, compiled in Marysville, Ohio, in 1876, with Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping following; many of its receipts are credited to the woman who supplied it, which is why Miss Mary E. Miller's name stands where a headnote would be today. Her closing line, "Good and easily made," is the kind of endorsement that carried weight in a book assembled from neighbors' kitchens.