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Flour Mixtures Continued: Cake: Whites
WHITE LAYER CAKE 1/2 cup of butter 3 level teaspoonfuls of baking 1 cup of sugar powder 1/2 cup of milk Whites of 3 eggs, beaten dry 2 cups of sifted flour Mix in the usual manner. See "Manner of Mixing a Butter Cake." Bake in two layers about twenty minutes. Put together with boiled chocolate frosting. Decorate with halves of English walnuts if desired. Or, bake in a sheet about thirty-five minutes and when cold cover with Caramel Nut Frosting. WHITE NUT CAKE 1/2 cup of butter powder 1 1/2 cups of granulated sugar 1/4 teaspoonful salt 3/4 cup of water The whites of 4 eggs 2 1/4 cups of flour 1 cup of walnut meats broken 4 level teaspoonfuls of baking in pieces Mix in the usual manner; bake in a sheet. Frost as desired. BURNT SUGAR CAKE 1/2 cup of butter Whites of 2 eggs 1 cup of sugar Frosting for Burnt Sugar Cake: Yolks of 3 eggs 3/4 cup of sugar 2 cups of sifted flour 1/3 cup of water 2 level teaspoonfuls of baking 2 tablespoonfuls of caramel powder syrup 1 cup of cold water The white of 1 egg 3 teaspoonfuls of caramel syrup 1 teaspoonful of vanilla extract Make both cake and frosting in the usual manner.
NUT AND RAISIN CAKE 1/2 cup of butter 2 level teaspoonfuls of baking 1 cup of sugar powder 3 eggs, unbeaten 3/4 cup of milk 1 cup of nut meats Grated rind of 1 lemon 1/2 cups of raisins 1/4 teaspoonful of cinnamon 2 cups of sifted flour 1/4 teaspoonful of mace Add the eggs, one at a time, to the creamed butter and sugar and beat in thoroughly. Put the nuts and raisins through a food chopper, then rub these through the flour sifted with the baking powder and spices. Bake in a tube pan or in a sheet. Cover with caramel nut frosting.
Four butter cakes from the era when a recipe was printed in two narrow columns and the reader was expected to know the creaming method by heart. The ingredient lists here have been scrambled by that column layout, so read them with care before you start.
- Read the columns back togetherWords that look like stray ingredients are the tails of split lines: "3 level teaspoonfuls of baking / powder," "4 level teaspoonfuls of baking / powder," "2 tablespoonfuls of caramel / syrup." There is no separate powder or syrup ingredient.
- The mixing method"Mix in the usual manner" means the standard butter-cake sequence: cream butter and sugar, add liquid and sifted dry ingredients alternately, then fold in the stiffly beaten whites last. "Beaten dry" is the period phrase for whites whipped to stiff, dull peaks rather than glossy soft ones.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the cook was expected to know her own range. A moderate oven, in modern terms around 350F, is the usual equivalent for cakes of this type, and the twenty-minute layers and thirty-five-minute sheet are consistent with it.
- Baking powder is out of scaleBaking powder looks out of scale -- period recipes routinely call for more than modern ones, and three to four teaspoons for two to two and a quarter cups of flour is well above the current 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoons per cup; too much can give a coarse crumb and a bitter, soapy aftertaste.
- PansThe book gives no sizes. Two layers of this quantity are usually baked in 8-inch rounds, and a 'sheet' here means a shallow square or oblong pan, not a modern rimmed baking sheet.
- Caramel syrupThis is burnt sugar syrup, not caramel sauce: sugar melted and cooked dark, then thinned with boiling water and cooled. It supplies both the colour and the slightly bitter flavour of the burnt sugar cake and its frosting.
- The burnt sugar list is unreliableThe burnt sugar list is hard to untangle -- as the columns fall, the cake takes the yolks of 3 eggs, the whites of 2, a cup of cold water and 3 teaspoonfuls of caramel syrup against 2 cups of flour, while the frosting takes sugar, water, caramel syrup, the white of 1 egg and vanilla. Which egg lines belong to which list is not certain from the printed page, and the water is high for the flour; treat both as suspect rather than guessing at them.
- Raisin quantity"1/2 cups of raisins" in the nut and raisin cake is a dropped numeral, almost certainly 1 1/2 cups. Flouring the chopped fruit and nuts, as directed, keeps them suspended instead of sinking.
- Food chopperThe hand-cranked chopper coarsely minced nuts and raisins together. A few pulses in a processor does the same, but stop early: overworked raisins turn to paste and the batter darkens.
White cakes belong to the age of cheap chemical leavening and cheap white flour. Once baking powder was a reliable pantry staple, the pale, fine-grained cake built on egg whites alone became a mark of a good cook and of a well-supplied kitchen, and the leftover yolks went into custards, gold cake or salad dressing. Burnt sugar cake was one answer to the problem of flavouring such cakes: caramelising sugar and thinning it with water gave both colour and a deep, faintly scorched taste for the cost of a cupful of sugar and some attention at the stove. That these recipes appear in a book called Cooking for Two says something about the period's sense of proportion; a two-layer cake was simply what a cake was.