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Tilden Cake
One cup butter, two of pulverized sugar, one of sweet milk, three of flour, half cup corn starch, four eggs, two tea-spoons bakingpowder, two of lemon extract. This is so excellent that a "barrel" would not be too much of it. - Mrs. T. B., Chicago, Ill. .
A plain butter cake of the pound-cake family, lightened with cornstarch and baking powder. The original assumes you know the creaming method and own a wood-fired range, so the working details are left out.
- Pulverized sugarIn this period pulverized sugar means sugar ground finer than granulated; superfine or caster sugar is the nearest modern equivalent. It is not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or sour milk used in saleratus recipes. Whole milk is the right substitute.
- The cornstarchHalf a cup of cornstarch replacing part of the flour cuts the gluten and gives a finer, more tender crumb. Measure it as part of the dry ingredients and sift it with the flour and baking powder so it does not clump.
- Method, unstatedCream the butter and sugar until pale, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk, beginning and ending with dry. Overworking after the flour goes in toughens a cake this rich.
- OvenNo temperature or oven description is given at all. A modern working temperature for a butter cake of this size is about 350F, baked until a skewer comes out clean.
- Quantity and pansThree cups of flour and half a cup of cornstarch make three and a half cups of dry ingredients, which with a full cup of butter gives a large cake -- enough for a 10-inch tube pan or a 9x13. It serves 12 to 16.
- Lemon extractLemon was a common cake flavoring in cookbooks of this period. Zest of a lemon added at the creaming stage gives a fresher result.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons for three and a half cups of dry ingredients is on the modest side by current practice, which tends toward a teaspoon per cup of flour. The four eggs and thorough creaming are doing much of the lifting here.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, first published in the late 1870s, is full of cakes named for public figures, and Tilden Cake almost certainly nods to Samuel J. Tilden, the Democratic governor of New York who won the popular vote in the disputed presidential election of 1876 and lost the presidency in the compromise that followed. Naming a cake after a candidate was ordinary parlor politics: community cookbooks of the period carry cakes named for public men, alongside recipes credited only by initials and a city, as this one is to Mrs. T. B. of Chicago. The recipe itself belongs to the family of cornstarch cakes that became common after commercial cornstarch turned into a cheap grocery staple in the mid-nineteenth century -- cooks found that swapping a portion of the flour for it produced the fine, close crumb then admired in a "delicate" cake.