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Silver Part (Two cups sugar one of butter)
Two cups sugar, one of butter, four (scant) of flour, one of sour milk, tea-spoon soda, table-spoon corn starch, whites of eight eggs; flavor with almond or peach. Put in pan, alternately, one spoonful of gold and one of silver. - Miss Emma Fisher.
This is only half a cake. The silver batter is meant to be spooned into the pan alternately with a gold batter (the yolk-based companion recipe), so plan to mix both before either goes in the pan.
- The hinge: alternate, don't stirDrop the two batters in alternating spoonfuls and leave them alone, or at most draw a knife through once. Stirring blends the yellow and white into a uniform buff and the marbling disappears.
- Cup and spoon sizesA tablespoon of cornstarch is about 8 g. The book does not define its measures; treat a cup as roughly 8 fl oz, and note that a teaspoon of soda in older kitchens may have meant a rounded rather than a level spoon, so start with a level 5 ml.
- Sour milkUse cultured buttermilk. Fresh milk soured on the counter is not the same product and is not safe today. The acid is there to react with the soda, which is the only chemical leavening in the batter.
- Eight egg whitesThat is roughly 1 cup (240 ml) of whites, about 240 g. The recipe does not say to beat them separately, but folding in whites whipped to soft peaks at the end gives the light, pale crumb the name promises.
- Peach flavoringNineteenth-century peach extract was made from peach kernels and tastes of bitter almond, so almond extract is the direct modern substitute. A teaspoon is plenty for this quantity of batter.
- FlourFour scant cups is about 450-480 g. Flour of the period varied and was generally less strong than modern all-purpose; a cake or pastry flour gives a closer texture, and the tablespoon of cornstarch is doing the same softening work.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given because the book assumes a wood range. Bake at 350F (175C) in a greased and floured 10-inch tube pan, or two 9-inch loaf pans, for 50-70 minutes until a skewer comes out clean.
- YieldThis is a large quantity of batter; combined with the gold part it will make a tall cake or two loaves, so check that your pan is big enough before you start filling it.
Gold-and-silver cake is a bookkeeping solution as much as a dessert: a cake made with eight whites leaves eight yolks on the cook's hands, and the paired "gold part" uses them up, so nothing from the eight eggs is wasted. The two batters baked together in one pan produce the marbled slice that Victorian cookbooks list under names like gold and silver cake. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, whose origins are generally traced to an Ohio compilation that grew into the Minneapolis publication, is full of recipes attributed to named contributors; a version like Miss Emma Fisher's is typical in giving proportions and flavoring but no oven instruction at all, since judging the heat of a wood range was assumed knowledge. The almond or peach flavoring points to the era's fondness for benzaldehyde notes in white cakes, a taste that lingers today in wedding-cake almond extract.