Delicate Cake
1/2 cup butter 1 1/2 cups sugar 2 cups Gold Medal flour 1/2 cup milk 4 eggs (whites only) 1 teaspoon baking powder Almond, vanilla or lemon extract for flavoring. Makes one sheet. Orange Cake, No. 1 2 cups sugar 1/2 cup butter 2 cups Gold Medal flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 5 egg yolks 4 egg whites Grated rind of 1 orange 1/2 cup orange juice Filling and Frosting: White of 1 egg beaten stiff, add alternately powdered sugar and orange juice until the juice of 1 large orange and 1/2 lemon has been used. It will take from 1 1/2 to 2 cups sugar.
Orange Cake, No. 1 Two eggs 1 cup of sugar 1 tablespoon melted butter 1/2 cup of milk 1 1/2 cups of Gold Medal flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 tablespoon of orange juice 1 teaspoon grated rind Mix in order given and bake in square pan, split and fill with orange cream. Orange Cream: Put into a cup the rind of 1/2 and the juice of 1 orange, 1 tablespoon of lemon juice, and fill with hot water. Strain and put on to boil, add 1 tablespoon corn starch, wet with cold water and cook ten minutes, being careful not to scorch. Beat yolk of egg with 2 heaping teaspoons sugar, add to the mixture with 1 teaspoon butter, let cook until the butter is disolved and cool. Fill the cake with cream and frost with orange icing.--Boston Cook Book. Pineapple Cake, No. 2 1 cup sugar 1 cup butter 3 egg yolks 2 cups Gold Medal flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 2 tablespoons pineapple juice Cream the butter and the sugar, add the well-beaten yolks and the flour sifted with baking powder. Add the flavoring, and bake in three jelly cake tins. Two tablespoons of water and 1/4 teaspoon mace with 1/2 teaspoon vanilla may be substituted for the pineapple juice.
Filling. Boil 2 cups sugar with 2/3 cup cream for ten minutes. Take from the fire and beat till thick and smooth. To 1/3 of this add 1 cup grated pineapple to spread between the layers. To the remaining 2/3 add enough pineapple juice to make it spread smoothly for an icing.
The page runs several cakes together with almost no method, which was normal in a flour-company booklet aimed at cooks who already knew how a butter cake goes together. The gaps worth filling are pan size, oven heat, and the mixing order for the whites.
- The hinge: fold the whites in lastDelicate Cake gets its lift and pale crumb from stiffly beaten whites. Cream the butter and sugar, add the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk, then fold in the four beaten whites at the end. Beating them into the batter collapses them and gives a denser, closer crumb.
- "Makes one sheet"A sheet here means a shallow square or rectangular pan rather than a modern half-sheet tray; the book gives no size, but a batter of two cups flour suits something in the 8- or 9-inch range, and it would also divide between two 8-inch round layers.
- Oven heatNeither cake gives a temperature. A moderate oven for a butter cake of this kind is 350F: about 30-35 minutes for a single sheet, 20-25 for thin layers, 12-15 for the pineapple cake's jelly tins.
- Baking powderOne teaspoon to two cups of flour is light by current practice. Two teaspoons per two cups of flour, as the orange cakes use, is nearer the modern proportion.
- Gold Medal flourRead as ordinary bleached all-purpose. If you have cake flour, use it for the Delicate Cake and add two extra tablespoons per cup for a finer crumb.
- Flavoring quantity"Almond, vanilla or lemon extract" is left open. A teaspoon is right for vanilla or lemon; a half teaspoon for almond, which dominates quickly.
- Uncooked orange frostingThe Orange Cake No. 1 filling is raw egg white beaten with powdered sugar and juice, never heated. If you make it, use pasteurized whites or powdered egg white, particularly for children or anyone with a weakened immune system.
- Jelly cake tins and the pineapple fillingJelly cake tins are 8- or 9-inch shallow rounds. Boiling two cups sugar with cream and then beating it thick is a fudge-type filling; watch it rather than trusting the ten minutes, and beat it before it sets. Use crushed canned pineapple in place of "grated."
- Two recipes with the same nameBoth orange cakes are printed as "No. 1," a compositor's slip. The first is a five-yolk cake with a beaten frosting; the second is a plain two-egg cake split and filled with cornstarch orange cream, credited to the Boston Cook Book.
- Leftover yolksDelicate Cake leaves four yolks. The orange cream on the same page uses a yolk, and yolk-based cakes and custards are the obvious place for the rest.
"Delicate cake" was the standard American name for a white cake raised with egg whites alone, the pale half of the gold-and-silver pair that let a thrifty kitchen use up both yolks and whites across two dishes rather than throwing either away. Its rise through the later nineteenth century tracks two things: cheap chemical baking powder, which made a fine even crumb possible without hours of hand-beating, and the roller-milled white patent flours that companies like Washburn-Crosby of Minneapolis, makers of Gold Medal, were selling hard. Booklets of this kind were advertising, given away or sold for a few cents with the brand name repeated in every ingredient list, and their recipes are terse because they were meant to slot into what a housekeeper already did. The credit to the Boston Cook Book is usually taken to point back to Mary Lincoln's influential 1884 volume, though the phrase was also used loosely for the Boston Cooking-School tradition generally.