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White Perfection Cake
Three cups sugar, one of butter, one of milk, three of flour, one of corn starch, whites of twelve eggs beaten to a stiff froth, two tea-spoons cream tartar in the flour, and one of soda in half the milk; dissolve the corn starch in the rest of the milk, and add it to the sugar and butter well beaten together, then the milk and soda, and the flour and whites of eggs. This cake is rightly named "Perfection." -Mrs. C. Jones, Bradford, Vt.
A very large white cake in the 1870s style, leavened with the cream of tartar and soda pairing that predates reliable commercial baking powder. The batter runs to roughly four quarts, so plan pans before you start creaming.
- Scale and pansThree cups sugar, three cups flour and twelve whites is about double a modern layer cake. Bake it as three 9-inch layers plus a small loaf, or in two large tube pans; a single pan will not cook through.
- Oven temperatureBuckeye Cookery assumes a wood range and gives no number. Bake at 350F. Layers take 25-35 minutes, a tube or loaf shape 50-65 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean.
- The leaveningTwo teaspoons cream of tartar with one of soda is the period equivalent of roughly four teaspoons of baking powder. The soda goes into half the milk and the cream of tartar into the flour, which keeps the two apart until they meet in the batter; if you substitute baking powder, sift it with the flour and skip the split milk.
- Corn starchOne cup of corn starch replaces part of the flour and softens the crumb, standing in for the soft cake flour we now buy. Dissolve it in cold milk to a smooth slurry, or it will lump.
- Egg whitesTwelve whites is about 1 1/2 cups. Beat to a stiff but not dry froth and fold them in last with a light hand; the instruction to add flour and whites together is best read as alternating them rather than stirring the whites in as liquid.
- ButterOne cup, or two sticks, at cool room temperature. Cream it with the sugar until pale and light before anything else goes in, since this cake gets much of its lift from air beaten into the fat and the whites.
- FlavouringThe recipe gives none. Vanilla, or the almond extract common at the time, will not spoil it.
- KeepingYields around 24 generous servings. It is a firm, close-grained cake that keeps three or four days well wrapped, and takes a boiled white icing better than a soft frosting.
White cakes like this one belong to the moment when American home bakers had cheap refined sugar and corn starch on the shelf and many still mixed their own acid and alkali by hand -- cream of tartar in the flour, soda in the milk -- though commercial baking powders were already on sale by the 1870s. Using twelve whites and no yolks made for a cake that came out snow-white. The Buckeye lineage began with the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox and published at Marysville, Ohio, in 1876 in aid of the First Congregational Church; it gathered hundreds of contributions under the names and towns of the women who sent them, which is why Mrs. C. Jones of Bradford is allowed the last word on whether the cake deserves its name.