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American White Cake
Beat half a cupful of butter to a cream: work in gradually two and a half cupfuls of flour, a cupful of milk, the whites of six eggs, and, last of all, a tea-spoonful of cream of tarter, and half a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda. Pour the mixture into a buttered tin, and bake in a quick oven. Directly it is taken out of the oven, brush whisked white of egg over the top, and sift loaf sugar on it. Time to bake, about an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for a quart mould.
A late-Victorian British rendering of the American "white" or "silver" cake, made pale by using only egg whites. As printed it has one glaring omission and one contradiction, both worth settling before you turn the oven on.
- There is no sugar in the batterCassell's list contains no sugar at all, which looks like a printer's omission: American white cake recipes normally cream sugar with the butter. Without it you get a pale, bland bread rather than a cake. Something in the region of 1 to 1 1/2 cupfuls, creamed with the butter before the flour and milk go in, is a reasonable reconstruction for this quantity of flour.
- Oven temperature versus time"Quick oven" is usually read as somewhere around 400-425F, hot enough to colour the outside of a large butter cake well before an hour is up. For a deep tin baked an hour, about 350F is the workable modern reading; check at 45 minutes with a skewer.
- Cream of tartar and sodaThis is the pre-baking-powder pairing: 1 tsp cream of tartar with 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda is roughly equivalent to 2 tsp modern baking powder. Sift both through the flour rather than adding them last, as the reaction begins the moment they meet the milk.
- Egg whitesThe whites of six of today's large eggs give about 200 ml. Whisk them to soft peaks and fold them in at the end rather than beating them into the batter, or the cake loses the lightness the whites are there to provide.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in hard cones, nipped and pounded for use, though by the later nineteenth century cubes and granulated sugar were also on sale. Sifted icing sugar is the nearest thing for dusting; granulated will sit on top in grains rather than settling into the glaze.
- The raw egg glazeWhisked white brushed onto a cake straight from the oven does not reach a temperature that would pasteurise it. Return the glazed cake to the switched-off oven for five to ten minutes to set the surface, or skip the glaze and simply dust the top.
- Tin and yield"Sufficient for a quart mould" means a mould of roughly 1.1 litres, near enough a small (about 7 inch) round tin. Slice count will depend on how deep the cake rises.
- Cost1s. 6d. is the retail price at the time of printing, when eggs and butter were the expensive part. It is a period price signal, not a conversion worth attempting.
White cake belongs to a family of American nineteenth-century cakes sorted by colour and by which part of the egg went into them: silver or white cake used the whites, gold cake the yolks, and the pair are often said to have been baked together in thrifty households so nothing was wasted. Cakes of this kind depended on finely bolted white flour and on reliable chemical leavening, first as separate packets of cream of tartar and bicarbonate of soda, later combined as baking powder; the widespread availability of very white, roller-milled flour came later, in the 1870s and 1880s. That Cassell's, a London publisher, files the recipe under "American" shows how these pale, soda-raised cakes were read in Britain as a distinctly transatlantic style, quite unlike the fruited, yeast- or egg-raised English cakes beside them in the same dictionary.