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White Cake (One and one-half cups flour)
One and one-half cups flour, one cup sugar, whites of two eggs, one rounding teaspoon baking powder, butter, milk, flavoring. Break the whites of two eggs in a measuring cup (don't beat), add butter to fill the cup to one-half, fill up with milk, mix baking powder with flour. Beat all together.
— Miss Julia Russell Drake
A cake built entirely in a measuring cup: the egg whites, butter and milk together make exactly one cup of wet ingredients, so the proportions hold no matter how large the eggs are. The method is the whole point, and it works.
- How the cup worksTwo unbeaten whites come to roughly 1/4 cup. Softened butter is then packed in to reach the 1/2 cup line (about 4 tablespoons), and milk fills to 1 cup (about 1/2 cup milk). If your eggs are large, you will use slightly less of each of the others, which is the intended self-correction.
- "Don't beat"The whites are not whipped and there is no creaming step. All lift comes from the baking powder, so mix only until the batter is smooth and get it into the oven promptly.
- Butter temperatureUse butter soft enough to press into the cup without air pockets, or melt and cool it and measure by displacement. Cold hard butter will not incorporate in a single beating.
- Baking powderA "rounding teaspoon" is somewhere between one and two level teaspoons; 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 level teaspoons of modern double-acting powder suits 1 1/2 cups flour.
- SaltThe receipt gives none; butter of the period was often salted. With unsalted butter add 1/4 teaspoon.
- FlavoringUnspecified because the cook chose: 1 teaspoon vanilla, or 1/2 teaspoon almond extract, which was a common choice for white cakes.
- Pan and ovenThis is a small batter, and the receipt gives no oven direction. Use one 8-inch round or a small loaf pan, buttered and floured, and bake at 350F for 25 to 30 minutes, until a tester comes out clean.
- YieldOne thin single layer, six to eight servings. Double it for a filled two-layer cake, and expect a firm, close crumb rather than a fluffy one.
White cake as a distinct category owed much to reliable chemical baking powder, which allowed a cake to rise without beaten whites or yeast, and to increasingly cheap refined sugar and finely milled white flour, which made pallor a mark of quality rather than an accident; white cakes raised on beaten whites alone predate baking powder. Recipes using whites alone left the household with spare yolks, which could be turned into custard or gold cake. Receipts of this kind, where the cup itself does the arithmetic so the method can be copied down in two lines and carried in the head, appear in community cookbooks. Subscription cookbooks compiled by churches and ladies' aid societies to raise money typically printed each contribution over the contributor's name, and the name attached to a cake was part of its recommendation.