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Cream Cake (One and one-half cups of sugar)
One and one-half cups of sugar, one cup of milk, one-half cup of butter, two and one-half cups of flour, the whites of two eggs, two and one-half teaspoons of baking powder.
Filling-One egg, one tablespoon of cornstarch, one cup of milk,
— Mrs. Zobles T. Cater
four tablespoons of sugar.
A plain butter-and-milk layer cake with a boiled custard filling, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew the method. Everything but the ingredients has to be supplied.
- Method the recipe assumesCream the butter with the sugar, add the milk and flour sifted with the baking powder alternately, then fold in the whites beaten stiff. Folding the whites in last helps keep the crumb light, alongside the baking powder.
- Pan and ovenNeither pan nor oven is given. Two 8-inch round layers, greased and floured, baked at 350F for 25 to 30 minutes until a tester comes out clean, is a workable modern reading. "Cream cake" in books of this kind usually means a filled two-layer cake rather than a single sheet.
- FlourHousehold flour of this period was often softer than modern all-purpose, though it varied. Cake flour, or all-purpose with two tablespoons per cup replaced by cornstarch, will give a more tender crumb.
- Baking powderTwo and one-half teaspoons for two and one-half cups of flour is generous by current standards but not wrong; the strength of period powders varied. Two teaspoons of a modern double-acting powder is a safe substitution.
- The filling is a stovetop custardWhisk the egg, sugar and cornstarch, temper in the hot milk, then cook over low heat stirring constantly until it thickens and just comes to a bare boil so the cornstarch loses its raw taste. It must be cooled completely before it goes between the layers or it will soak them.
- Filling quantityOne cup of milk makes a thin layer, adequate for two 8-inch rounds and nothing more. No flavouring is listed; half a teaspoon of vanilla stirred in off the heat is a period-appropriate addition.
- Leftover yolksThe cake uses only whites and the filling only one whole egg, so you are left with two yolks. Adding them to the custard in place of the whole egg gives a richer filling and wastes nothing.
- YieldOne two-layer cake, eight to ten servings. The filling is lean and the cake stales quickly; it is best eaten the day it is made.
"Cream cake" in nineteenth-century American receipt books often means something other than whipped cream. In many cases it describes a plain layer cake split and filled with a boiled cornstarch custard, the same thing that later got called Boston cream pie or, in church cookbooks, simply cream pie. Cornstarch became a cheap grocery staple in the United States after the middle of the century, and it let a household thicken a cup of milk into a pastry-cream filling with a single egg, well short of the richer, more egg-heavy French cr/me e p tissi re. That economy may be why the filling shows up over and over in community cookbooks like this one, where recipes were collected from neighbors and printed under their names. The compressed style here, with no pan size, oven note or baking time, is typical of the genre.