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White Cake
½ cup butter. 2 cups granulated sugar 3 eggs (beaten separately) ½ cup sour milk 2 teaspoons (heaping) baking powder ¼ teaspoon saleratus 2 cups Five Roses flour.
Cream butter, then mix in the sugar; next add the beaten yolks, to which a little of the beaten whites has been added, Then add sour milk to which has been added the saleratus. Add the sweet milk and flour. Put in little milk, then little flour, till everything is used up. ing may be put in the sour milk. Hot oven for 20 minutes.
Flavor-
The text as printed is incomplete — the ingredient list has lost the butter and the sweet milk, both of which the method calls for, and the last lines are scrambled by the typesetter. Treat it as a template rather than a set of exact quantities.
- Missing quantitiesNo amount is given for butter or for sweet milk, though both appear in the method. For a two-cup-flour cake of this era, ½ cup butter and about ½ cup sweet milk are the usual proportions, but this is inference, not what the book says.
- SaleratusSaleratus is the older name for the chemical leavening that became baking soda (originally potassium bicarbonate, later sodium bicarbonate). Here it works with the acid in the sour milk; the baking powder is doing separate duty. One teaspoon of soda plus two heaping teaspoons of powder against two cups of flour is heavy leavening by modern standards and may leave a coarse crumb and a soda taste — half a teaspoon of soda is nearer the mark for ½ cup of sour milk.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk, roughly the acidity of buttermilk. Use buttermilk, or milk with a teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- The scrambled last linesRead them as: "Flavoring may be put in the sour milk. Hot oven for 20 minutes." The flavoring is unspecified; almond or vanilla extract would both suit.
- The whitesThe eggs are beaten separately and only "a little of the beaten whites" goes in with the yolks. The remaining whites should be folded in at the very end, after the flour; the printed method never says so, and skipping it wastes the separation entirely.
- Oven"Hot oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 400–450F, which suits thin layers in twenty minutes but risks scorching a single deep cake. Two 8-inch layers at 375–400F for 20–25 minutes is the safer modern reading.
- FlourFive Roses was a Canadian hard spring-wheat flour, stronger than modern cake flour. Two cups will weigh roughly 250–280 g depending on how it is measured; a cake flour substitution will behave differently and may need adjusting.
- YieldTwo 8-inch layers, or one 9-inch square — eight to ten servings.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, of Montreal and Winnipeg, and was built largely from recipes sent in by Canadian users of the company's flour — which fits the personal, talk-you-through-it phrasing here and may account for the missing quantities. "White cake" in this period is less a fixed formula than a distinction of colour, naming a cake pale in crumb as against the dark, molasses-and-spice or fruited cakes; note that this one keeps the yolks, so it is not white in the strict later sense. The word saleratus is a good marker of the book's roots — it was falling out of commercial use in favour of "baking soda" by the early twentieth century, but survived in kitchen speech alongside the newer commercial baking powder that this cake also uses.