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Delicate Cake (One-half cup butter one)
One-half cup butter, one and one-half cups sugar, one-half cup milk, two cups flour, one teaspoon baking powder, whites of four eggs, flavor to taste.
— Mrs. I. Timmerman
A plain white butter cake in the old ingredient-list style: no method, no pan, no oven. The proportions are sound and standard for the period, and the assembly is the conventional creaming method.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter with the sugar until pale, add the flour and milk alternately, then fold in the egg whites beaten to soft peaks. The whites are the only lift beyond the teaspoon of baking powder, so fold rather than stir.
- Baking powder amountOne teaspoon to two cups of flour is light by modern standards; period baking powders were single-acting rather than double-acting. Up to two teaspoons is reasonable with today's product if the cake comes out dense.
- FlourHousehold flour of the period varied, and much of it was softer than modern all-purpose. Cake flour gives a texture closer to what "delicate" suggests here; if using all-purpose, remove two tablespoons per cup.
- CupsBy the later nineteenth century the American cup was settling near 8 fl oz, so the measures can be read literally. Butter at half a cup is 4 oz, one stick.
- Flavor to tasteAlmond extract or rosewater suit a white cake; vanilla works. Reckon on a teaspoon, adjusting to taste.
- Oven and panBake at 350F. The batter fills one 8- or 9-inch round or a small loaf pan; 30 to 40 minutes for the round, longer for the loaf, until a skewer comes out clean.
- The four yolksThe recipe leaves four yolks over. Keep them for a gold cake, curd, or boiled dressing rather than discarding.
- YieldOne layer, about eight servings. Doubled, it makes a two-layer cake, filled and finished with a boiled white icing.
"Delicate cake" was a recognized nineteenth-century category rather than one cook's invention: a butter cake made with egg whites only, so that it baked pale, in contrast to the yolk-rich "gold" cakes that used the other half of the egg. The whiteness was the point. Refined white sugar and finely bolted flour were markers of a well-provisioned kitchen, and a cake that showed them off plainly was a compliment to the household. Community cookbooks like this one, printed with each contributor's name attached, seem to have preserved recipes much as one woman would have handed them to another — a bare list of quantities, on what was presumably the assumption that any reader already knew how to cream butter and how hot her own stove ran.