Chester Conklin
Celebrity
GOLD CAKE
1 cup sugar 1 teaspoon cream of tartar 1/2 cup butter 1/2 teaspoon soda Yolks of 4 eggs 2 cups flour ½ cup milk 3/4 teaspoon vanilla Cream butter, add sugar, eggs well beaten, milk, flour mixed and sifted with soda and cream of tartar, and vanilla.
Bake in a fluted cake tin.
A plain yolk-rich butter cake from the era before packaged baking powder was universal. Two things in the original need attention before you start: the milk quantity and the missing oven temperature.
- The milk is suspect"1½ cup milk" against 2 cups flour and only half a cup of butter would give a batter close to pancake consistency. A half-cup is the likelier reading, and the fraction may well have been mangled in typesetting. Start with 1/2 cup and add a spoonful more only if the batter will not fall from the spoon.
- No oven temperature is givenCookbooks of this period assumed the cook knew her range. A butter cake of this size wants 350F, 30 to 40 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTogether these are homemade baking powder: 1/2 teaspoon soda to 1 teaspoon cream of tartar works out at roughly a tablespoon-and-a-half to two teaspoons' worth of modern double-acting powder, by the usual rule of thumb. Because this version acts as soon as it wets, get the batter into the tin and into the oven without dawdling.
- A fluted cake tinMost likely a fluted ring or Turk's-head mould rather than a deep modern bundt pan, though the recipe does not say. An 8- or 9-inch fluted tin, well buttered and floured in every groove, is a sensible size; a plain 8-inch round works too.
- Beat the yolks properlyThe yolks are the only egg in the cake, since no whites go in, and the recipe does specify "eggs well beaten." Beat them until thick and pale before they meet the creamed butter for a lighter crumb.
- Sift the flour with the leaveningThe instruction to mix and sift flour with soda and cream of tartar is not decoration. Undispersed soda leaves yellow-brown speckles and a soapy taste in a batter this pale.
- YieldAbout eight to ten slices from a single fluted tin. The cake is unfrosted as written; a thin lemon or vanilla glaze suits it.
"Gold cake" was the twin of the "silver cake" or white cake that used the whites, and the pair existed for a practical reason: leftover yolks were awkward to keep, so a thrifty cook could bake both halves of the egg the same afternoon. The cream-of-tartar-and-soda leavening here suggests the formula belongs to the long stretch when commercial baking powder was available but many households still mixed their own. Its appearance in a collection of actors' recipes probably reflects the genre rather than the man: celebrity cookbooks are often said to have been assembled by publicists and charities, with contributions tending to be reliable family standards rather than anything invented for the page.