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Favorite Snow-Cake
Beat one cup butter to a cream, add one and a half cups flour and stir very thoroughly together; then add one cup corn starch, and one cup sweet milk in which three tea-spoons baking-powder have been dissolved; last, add whites of eight eggs and two cups sugar well beaten together; flavor to taste, bake in sheets, and put together with icing. - Walter Moore, Hamilton.
A white butter cake in which cornstarch replaces a third of the flour, giving the fine, pale crumb that earned it the name. The method is unusual and worth following as written rather than reflexively creaming butter with sugar.
- The hinge: sugar goes with the whitesThe butter is creamed with flour and cornstarch, not sugar; the two cups of sugar are beaten into the eight egg whites and folded in last. Beat the whites to soft peaks, add the sugar gradually as for a meringue, then fold that mass into the heavy butter base in three additions or it will deflate.
- Sweet milkPlain unsoured whole milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or sour milk called for in soda recipes. One cup.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons is right for roughly two and a half cups of dry ingredients. Period powders were single-acting and their strength varied, so with modern double-acting powder 2 teaspoons is likely enough; once the whites are folded in, the batter should go straight into the pans.
- Corn starchThe same cornstarch sold today; measure it by spooning and levelling rather than scooping. It has no gluten, which is the point here.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F. Thin sheets or layers will be done in 18 to 25 minutes, when the tops spring back and the edges just pull from the pan.
- "Bake in sheets"Nineteenth-century layer cakes were baked in shallow round or square tins, not one deep pan. Divide the batter between three 9-inch pans, buttered and floured, or two 9-inch pans for thicker layers and a slightly longer bake.
- Flavoring"Flavor to taste" was left to the cook; vanilla, almond, lemon and rose water were all in use for pale cakes of this kind. A teaspoon total is enough.
- Icing and yieldMakes one three-layer cake serving 12 to 14. A plain boiled white icing or a simple confectioners' sugar icing suits it; anything egg-yolk based fights the color.
- The eight yolksSet them aside for custard, curd or a gold cake; white and yellow cakes often appear near each other in books of this period.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) collected contributions from Ohio housewives and neighbors, each signed with a name and town, and this one comes from Hamilton in the southwest of the state. "Snow cake" is a general name for the pale, egg-white cakes that became fashionable after inexpensive food-grade cornstarch reached American grocers in the middle of the century; the starch cut the flour's gluten and produced a whiteness and tenderness that plain wheat flour could not, and dozens of such recipes circulated under names like snow, silver, lady and bride cake. Ready-mixed baking powder was some two decades old by 1877, and recipes of this date often specify dissolving it in the milk rather than sifting it with the flour, a habit sometimes said to carry over from the older practice of dissolving saleratus. The abundance of eggs and butter, and the willingness to spend eight whites at once, marks this as a company cake rather than everyday baking.