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Delicate Cake
1 cup butter 2 cups sugar 1 cup sweet milk ½ teaspoon soda 1 cup cornstarch 2½ cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon cream of tartar 7 eggs (whites) Cream butter and sugar, dissolve soda in sweet milk and add. Sift together flour, cornstarch and cream of tartar and turn in to butter and sugar. Beat well, and add whites beaten to a stiff froth.
Flavor to taste. Bake in moderate oven.
This cake never fails of being good, if made with Five Roses flour.
A white butter cake of the type that filled Canadian tea tables around 1915, leavened with soda and cream of tartar rather than commercial baking powder. The original gives no pan, no time and no quantity of flavouring, so those are the gaps worth filling before you start.
- The hinge: fold, don't beatThe whites go in last and the recipe says "add" — fold them in with a spatula in three additions until just streak-free. The batter is stiff with cornstarch and a full cup of butter, and beating the whites in will deflate them and give you a dense, tight crumb.
- Moderate oven350F. If you bake it as a single tall cake, 325F is safer for the centre.
- Soda and cream of tartarHalf a teaspoon of soda with a teaspoon of cream of tartar is a scratch baking powder, and it starts working the moment the milk and dry ingredients meet. Have pans greased and the oven up to temperature before you combine, and get it in promptly.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk — whole milk. Nineteenth-century books distinguished it from the buttermilk or soured milk that was the usual partner to soda alone.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat flour, closer to modern bread flour than to soft cake flour. The cup of cornstarch would have helped cut its strength; with modern all-purpose flour the proportions still work, and cake flour is likely to give a more fragile cake.
- Seven egg whitesAbout 1 cup, or 210-240 g. Eggs of this period were far less standardised in size than modern graded eggs, so measure by volume rather than counting if you want to be exact. The yolks keep a day or two for custard.
- Flavour to tasteVanilla is the usual choice: 1 to 2 teaspoons, or vanilla with a little almond extract. Lemon extract and rose water also appear in recipes of this kind.
- Pan and timeThis is a large batter — roughly 1.5 kg. It fits a 10-inch tube pan (55-65 minutes at 325F), or three 9-inch round layers (25-30 minutes at 350F). Test with a skewer in the centre; serves 14-16.
"Delicate cake" was a standard name in North American cookbooks for a white cake made with egg whites only, and it often sat near a yolk-rich "gold cake" so that a cook using one had a use for the leftovers of the other. The cornstarch answers a problem modern bakers solve at the store: soft cake flour was not reliably available, and diluting strong flour with starch was a recognised way to lower its protein and get a finer crumb. This particular version comes from the Five Roses Cook Book, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to buyers of its flour; the closing line about the cake never failing "if made with Five Roses flour" shows plainly why the book existed. Mill-sponsored cookbooks of this kind were very widely owned in Canada in the early twentieth century, and the Five Roses book presented its recipes as contributed by users of the flour, which is part of why the instructions assume a cook who already knows how long her own oven takes.