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Cornstarch Cake
1 cup white sugar ½ cup butter 3 eggs ¾ cup milk 1½ cups Five Roses flour ½ cup cornstarch 1 teaspoon vanilla 2 teaspoons baking powder Cream butter and sugar, add eggs one at a time and beat well. Dissolve cornstarch in the milk, sift the baking powder in the flour 3 times. Add flavoring.
Bake.
A plain butter cake lightened with cornstarch, written for cooks who already knew what to do with a batter. The instructions stop at "Bake," so everything about pan, temperature and time has to be supplied.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F. A single 8- or 9-inch round or square pan takes 30-35 minutes; two thinner layers take 22-25. It is done when a skewer comes out clean and the edges have just begun to pull from the pan.
- The cornstarch is the pointHalf a cup of cornstarch replacing an equal measure of flour cuts the gluten and gives a fine, tender, close crumb — the same principle as modern cake flour. Substitute flour for it and you lose that tenderness, ending up with a coarser, more ordinary crumb.
- Dissolving the cornstarchWhisk the cornstarch into the cold milk until no lumps remain and use it promptly; it settles to the bottom quickly. Keep the milk cold rather than hot — heat above about 60C will start to gelatinise the starch.
- The step the recipe leaves outNothing tells you to combine the wet and dry. Add the sifted flour and the cornstarch-milk alternately to the creamed mixture, beginning and ending with flour, and stop mixing as soon as the batter is smooth.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour, stronger than most soft Southern brands. Plain all-purpose flour is the right modern equivalent — the cornstarch is already doing the softening.
- Sifting three timesRepeated sifting was the usual period way of getting baking powder evenly through the flour, and likely mattered more when flour was less uniformly milled than ours. One thorough sift, or a good whisking in the bowl, does the same job today.
- Pan preparationGrease and flour the pan, or line the base with parchment. This recipe says nothing about it, as many of the period's more compressed recipes do not.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 servings from a single 9-inch cake. It takes plain white icing or a lemon glaze well, and is dry enough by the second day to want one.
Cornstarch cakes appear throughout North American cookbooks from the 1870s onward, arriving with the commercial cornstarch industry — refiners promoted the product hard for baking and puddings as well as for laundry starch, and household books absorbed the idea that a portion of the flour could be replaced to soften the crumb. It was a practical solution before packaged cake flour was widely available: a cook with strong bread flour on hand could still produce a fine-textured cake. The Five Roses Cook Book, issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households, was itself a piece of flour promotion, and much of its cake section was contributed by home cooks.