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White Cake
One cup butter, two of sugar, one of sweet milk, three of flour, whites of five eggs, two tea-spoons baking powder. Easily made, and very good. - Mrs. Daniel Miller. $80
A plain butter cake in the old shorthand: proportions only, no method, no pan, no oven. The ratio is sound and translates directly, but you supply everything the printer left out.
- The measurementsOne cup butter (8 oz, 2 sticks), two cups sugar, one cup milk, three cups flour, five egg whites, two teaspoons baking powder. The book says nothing about how the cups were filled; taking them as level, that is roughly 360 g flour and 400 g sugar.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured whole milk, specified because the alternative in a nineteenth-century kitchen was sour milk or buttermilk, which would demand soda instead of baking powder. Use whole milk at room temperature.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter and sugar until pale and light, add flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk, then fold in the whites beaten to soft peaks. Beating the whites separately is what makes the crumb white and light; stirring them in unbeaten gives a denser, closer cake.
- Oven350F. The recipe specifies no oven at all; this is a modern reconstruction, not a temperature the book states.
- Pans and timeEnough batter for two 9-inch rounds (25-30 minutes) or a 10-inch tube pan (50-60 minutes). Test with a straw or skewer at the center.
- Flour has changedOhio flour of the 1870s was largely soft winter wheat, generally weaker than modern all-purpose, though harder roller-milled flours were coming in by then. If your cake comes out tough, substitute cake flour or replace two tablespoons of each cup of flour with cornstarch.
- The stray $80Not part of the recipe. It is a stray mark in the text, not a quantity and not a price for anything you need to buy; ignore it.
- Leftover yolksFive of them. They keep two days covered in the refrigerator and go into custard, mayonnaise, or the gold cake that traditionally partnered a white cake on the same table.
White cake spread among ordinary households as chemical leavening and cheap refined white sugar became widely available in the middle of the nineteenth century: the whole point of the thing is whiteness, which required whites-only eggs, pale butter, bolted white flour and no molasses. It was a display cake, proof that a cook could afford to waste five yolks, and the yolks were seldom actually wasted " using" using the yolks alone often turns up alongside it. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Marysville, Ohio and first published in 1877, gathered its contents from named local contributors, and Mrs. Daniel Miller's recipe is typical of what those women submitted: a memorized ratio, a two-word endorsement, and the assumption that any reader already knew how to cream butter and manage a fire.