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White Cake (Miss Sophia Ullett)
— Miss Sophia Ullett
One and one-half cups sugar, one cup sour milk, one-half cup butter, three cups flour into which is sifted one-half teaspoon of soda and one. teaspoon baking powder. Flavor with grated lemon peal.
— Mrs. Harmon Hallenbeck
A plain village cake written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed the reader already knew how to make cake. Everything about method, pan and oven is left out, so the gaps below matter more than the conversions.
- No eggs are listedWhite cakes of this era generally relied on egg whites, both for structure and for the pale colour that gives the cake its name, so the absence here may be an omission in setting the type rather than an intention; there is no way to tell from the page. As printed, the batter is closer to a sour-milk loaf than a layer cake. Expect a dense, tender crumb if you make it exactly as written.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, mildly acidic and slightly thickened. Pasteurised milk left out spoils rather than sours, so use buttermilk cup for cup, or stir a tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar into a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes.
- Soda and baking powder togetherThe half teaspoon of soda neutralises the acid in the sour milk; the teaspoon of baking powder supplies the lift the neutralised batter would otherwise lack. If you substitute sweet milk, the soda has nothing to work on and will leave a soapy taste.
- Method is assumedThe standard order for this kind of receipt is cream the butter and sugar, add the sour milk, then the sifted dry ingredients in two or three additions. Do not overwork once the flour is in, or the soda and powder will have spent themselves before the pan reaches the oven.
- The batter will be stiffThree cups of flour against one cup of liquid gives a thick batter that must be spread rather than poured. This is unremarkable for a cake of this kind.
- Pan and ovenA batter of this size should fill two 8-inch layers or one 9-inch square. The receipt gives no oven direction; at 350F the layers want 25 to 30 minutes, the square pan 35 to 40, until a straw comes out clean.
- Lemon peelGrate only the yellow zest, avoiding the white pith. Rub the zest of one lemon into the sugar with your fingertips before creaming, which draws out far more oil than stirring it into the finished batter.
- YieldAbout twelve to sixteen servings. Undressed it keeps two days well wrapped.
Community cookbooks like this one are generally understood to have been compiled by church guilds and village societies, with each contributor sending in a favourite receipt over her own name. The double attribution here — Miss Sophia Ullett at the head, Mrs. Harmon Hallenbeck at the foot — may well be an artefact of that process, where receipts were copied out, passed along and set into type in batches, and credit could drift between neighbouring entries, though nothing on the page confirms it. "White cake" as a category is often said to date from the nineteenth-century arrival of cheap refined white sugar and finely bolted flour, when a pale crumb was taken to signal that a household could afford the good ingredients rather than the darker, coarser stock of an earlier generation — an account that is itself contested. The pairing of soda with sour milk was the older leavening, and chemical baking powder the newer one; recipes from around 1900 sometimes use both at once, a cook hedging between the method she learned and the tin on the shelf.