Home › Cake-Making › Phil Sheridan Cake
Phil Sheridan Cake
Four cups fine white sugar, five of sifted flour, one of butter, one and a half of sweet milk, one tea-spoon soda dissolved in the milk, two of cream tartar, whites of sixteen eggs; stir sugar and butter to a cream, then add whites of eggs beaten to a stiff froth, next add flour, then the milk and soda; stir several minutes, and then add cream tartar and flavoring. This makes a large cake. - Mrs. Mary S. Moore, Granville.
A very large white cake of the sort Ohio households baked for gatherings, built on sixteen egg whites and leavened with the soda-and-cream-of-tartar pair that preceded commercial baking powder. Read the mixing order carefully before you start, because one step in it is backwards by modern practice.
- Add the cream of tartar with the flourThe recipe puts the cream of tartar in last, after the milk and soda. Dry acid stirred into a finished batter cannot distribute evenly, and it begins reacting the moment it hits liquid. Sift the two teaspoons of cream of tartar with the flour and the leavening will work as intended.
- Cups and butterTake the cup as the usual 8 fl oz measure, though period cups varied. One cup of butter is 8 oz / 225 g, or two American sticks. Five cups of sifted flour is roughly 575-600 g; weigh it if you can, since the batter is stiff enough that an extra 100 g of flour is felt.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabbered milk called for elsewhere in the book. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- Sixteen egg whitesAbout 2 cups / 480 ml of whites, roughly 480-500 g. Beat to a stiff but not dry froth. Folding them in before the flour, as written, works, but handle the later additions gently or the air you have just built goes out again.
- FlavoringUnspecified, as was common. Lemon extract, rose water or almond extract are all period-appropriate for a white cake of this date. Two teaspoons is enough for this quantity.
- OvenNo temperature is given because home ranges of the period had no reliable gauge. Bake at 325-350F. A cake this size wants the lower end and a long bake so the centre sets before the crust colours.
- Pans and yieldThis is genuinely a large cake: the batter fills a large tube pan with some to spare, or three to four 9-inch round layers, and serves a crowd. Halving it is reasonable for a household.
- Sixteen yolks left overGold cakes, custards and boiled dressings are the usual period uses for spare yolks. Refrigerate and use within a couple of days.
Buckeye Cookery collected contributions from Ohio housewives, and the practice of naming a cake for a public man was ordinary in the years after the Civil War. Philip H. Sheridan, the Union cavalry commander who had grown up in Somerset, Ohio, was a state hero, and a plain white cake bearing his name would have needed no explanation in Granville in the 1870s. The dish itself belongs to the family of "silver cakes" - egg-white cakes whose pallor was the point, since a snow-white crumb advertised both good flour and enough eggs to spare the yolks. Its leavening is the home cook's own baking powder: soda dissolved in milk and cream of tartar measured separately, mixed fresh in the bowl.