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Yellow Lady's Cake
One and a half cups flour, one of sugar, half cup butter, half cup sweet milk, tea-spoon soda, two tea-spoons cream tartar, yolks of four eggs, tea-spoon vanilla. - Olivia S. Hinman, Battle Creek, Mich.
A yolk-only butter cake given in the compressed style of the period: ingredients in a list, no pan, no oven, no time. Everything that matters has to be reconstructed from the ratios.
- The leavening is homemade baking powderOne teaspoon soda with two teaspoons cream of tartar is the classic 1:2 ratio that makes baking powder; the milk is "sweet" (fresh, not soured) because the acid is already supplied. At the usual equivalence (1 teaspoon baking powder = 1/4 teaspoon soda plus 1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar), the pair here corresponds to about 4 teaspoons of commercial baking powder for 1 1/2 cups of flour, which is a generous amount by modern standards.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk called for in other recipes of the period. Do not substitute buttermilk here; the acid the soda needs is already supplied by the cream of tartar.
- Mixing methodThe recipe gives none. A workable order: cream the butter and sugar, beat in the yolks, then add the flour sifted with the cream of tartar alternately with the milk, the soda dissolved in a little of the milk. This follows common practice for soda-and-cream-of-tartar cakes.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A cake of this size wants a moderate oven, 350F, for 25 to 30 minutes in a single 8-inch layer or roughly 35 minutes in a small loaf pan.
- Yield and panThe batter is small — about 3 cups. It fills one 8-inch round or two thin layers, and serves six to eight. Grease and flour, or line with parchment.
- Four yolks, and what to do with the whitesThe whites will go into a white cake, a boiled frosting, or meringue. Whether this recipe was intended as a deliberate companion to a white cake is not stated here.
- VanillaIn the 1870s a teaspoon of vanilla could mean a commercial extract of variable strength or a home-made one. Modern pure extract at the same measure is fine.
"Lady's cake" in American books of the 1870s and 1880s meant a delicate white cake made with egg whites only, often almond-scented and considered fine enough for company; the "yellow" version is its inevitable twin, often said to have arisen so the leftover yolks would not be wasted. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Marysville, Ohio, and printed in 1877 to raise money for a Congregational church parsonage, is built almost entirely from contributions like this one from Olivia S. Hinman of Battle Creek — signed, terse, and written for cooks who already knew how to cream butter and judge an oven by hand. The pairing of a white and a yellow cake from the same dozen eggs tells you a good deal about a period when eggs were seasonal, expensive in winter, and never thrown out.