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Delicate Cake (One-half cup of butter one)
One-half cup of butter, one and one-half cups of sugar, one-half cup of milk, whites of four eggs, two cups of flour, two teaspoons of baking powder; flavor with one-half teaspoon of lemon and one-half teaspoon of vanilla. Bake in one loaf.
— Mrs. Gilbert L. Jones
A plain white loaf cake of the late-nineteenth-century type, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew the method. What the receipt leaves out is more instructive than what it states.
- Method is assumedCream the butter and sugar, add the flavorings, then alternate flour (sifted with the baking powder) and milk. The whites go in last. Nothing in the wording tells you this; it was simply how cake was made.
- The egg whitesBeat them to soft, glossy peaks and fold them in at the end. Stirred in unbeaten, the cake still rises from the baking powder but comes out close-grained and slightly rubbery rather than light.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; the receipt assumes a cook judging her own oven. A moderate oven, about 350F, suits it; a loaf this size takes roughly 45 to 60 minutes; test with a skewer in the center.
- Pan size"One loaf" is left to the cook; a modern 8x4 or 9x5-inch loaf pan, greased and floured or lined with parchment, will take this batter. Do not fill beyond about two-thirds.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons for two cups of flour is about the usual proportion and works with modern double-acting powder. Period powders were single-acting, so the batter was expected to go into the oven at once; there is no benefit in letting it stand.
- FlourTwo cups of unsifted modern all-purpose flour weighs more than two cups of sifted flour, which is likely what was meant. Sift before measuring, or weigh out about 8 ounces, and the crumb will be closer to intended.
- FlavoringHalf a teaspoon each of lemon and vanilla. The receipt does not say which form of lemon; lemon oil, stronger than an alcohol extract, was also sold in this period. With a modern extract you can push the lemon to a full teaspoon without overwhelming the cake.
- YieldOne loaf, about 10 to 12 slices. It keeps two or three days wrapped. The receipt gives no icing; it takes a thin white icing well, or none at all.
Cakes built on egg whites alone were known through the second half of the nineteenth century as silver cake, white cake or, as here, delicate cake, and they existed largely as a solution to a bookkeeping problem: the yolks had to go somewhere. Community cookbooks of this era sometimes print a gold cake and a silver cake together so that a cook could use up four yolks in one and four whites in the other, or bake both and marble them together. The name "delicate" is often said to describe the pale crumb and the mild flavoring rather than any fragility in the making. This one arrives with a contributor's name attached, which is the whole character of a receipt collection of this kind: the recipes were subscribed by local women, printed as they wrote them, and assumed a reader who already knew how to cream butter and did not need to be told.