Home › Cake-Making › White Part (Two cups white sugar one)
White Part (Two cups white sugar one)
Two cups white sugar, one of butter, one of sweet milk, three and a half of flour, whites of eight eggs, two teaspoons cream tartar, one of soda dissolved in a little warm water. Red Part. One cup red sugar, half cup butter, third cup sweet milk, two cups flour, whites of four eggs, tea-spoon cream tartar, half tea-spoon soda, tea-cup raisins; be careful to keep the red part around the tube of the pan and the white around the edge. It requires two persons to fill the pan. This is a very attractive and. ornamental cake. - Mrs. Baxter.
A two-batter tube cake from the era when a cook mixed her own leavening from cream of tartar and soda. The instructions assume you already know how to build a butter cake; what needs translating is the sugar, the pan and the sheer volume.
- The hinge: two batters, one panBoth batters go in at once, wet, and must stay in concentric rings — red against the center tube, white against the outer wall. The practical method is to spoon or pipe them in alternately in thin layers all the way round rather than filling one ring to the top first, or the heavier red will slump under the white. The recipe's note that it takes two people is honest advice.
- "Red sugar"Granulated sugar tinted with coloring, sold by grocers and also made at home by rubbing sugar with a few drops of cochineal or with aniline (coal-tar) dye, which was already available by the 1870s. Use plain sugar and tint the finished red batter with a modern gel food color instead; a liquid color in the quantity needed to show through baked crumb will thin the batter.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTogether these are homemade baking powder. In the white part, 2 teaspoons cream of tartar with 1 teaspoon soda is roughly equivalent to 4 teaspoons of modern baking powder; the red part's halved amounts to about 2 teaspoons. The soda was dissolved in warm water so that undissolved lumps would not leave specks in the crumb.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. A modern equivalent would be a moderate oven, around 350F, or 325F for a large deep tube pan so the center sets without the outside over-browning. Reckon on 55 to 75 minutes and test with a skewer through the thickest part of the white.
- VolumeFive and a half cups of flour between the two batters makes a great deal of batter, quite possibly more than a modern 10-inch tube pan will hold. Be ready to bake off any surplus separately as a small loaf or a few cupcakes rather than filling the pan past two-thirds.
- Butter and cupsOne cup of butter is 8 oz, two sticks; the half cup in the red part is one stick. Nineteenth-century cup measures ran close enough to today's 8 fl oz that the proportions work; reckon flour at about 4 1/4 oz per cup and hold back a little if the batter seems stiff.
- Twelve egg whitesEight for the white part, four for the red. Whether they were beaten stiff and folded in or simply beaten and stirred is left unsaid; folding them in last gives the lighter crumb the cake is aiming for.
- YieldA full tube pan plus extra — about 16 to 20 servings. It is a cake for a crowd, and it slices best the day after baking, when the two colors have firmed and the cut face stays clean.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) belongs to the great age of the sectioned cake, when chemical leavening and cheap refined sugar made it possible for an ordinary household to produce something that looked designed rather than merely baked. Marble cake, ribbon cake and this red-and-white tube cake all trade on the same trick: two batters of similar density, differently colored, kept apart in the pan. The red was traditionally got from cochineal, the dried insect dye that colored everything from confectioners' sugar to army coats, though by the 1870s synthetic aniline reds were spreading fast and were not always well made. Note too that the white part uses only egg whites - the near-obsessive whiteness of the period's fine cakes was itself a display of expense, since it meant a dozen yolks were going somewhere else. Many of the book's recipes carry a contributor's name, as this one does, and Mrs. Baxter's closing line about needing two people to fill the pan is the sort of workaday detail that survives only because a working cook, not a professional author, wrote it down.