Plunkets
1 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 1/2 cups corn starch 1/2 cup Gold Medal flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 6 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla Cream the butter, add the sugar gradually; separate the eggs, beat the whites until stiff, beat the yolks and add them to the whites, then to the butter and sugar. Sift the dry ingredients and add gradually to the other mixture. Add flavoring. Bake in patty pans fifteen minutes.--Mrs. Rorer.
A cornstarch pound cake baked in small tins — very tender, very fine-grained, and easy to overwork. The book gives no oven temperature and no yield, so both need supplying.
- Patty pansThese are small shallow tins for individual cakes and tartlets, broadly comparable to a modern muffin or cupcake cup, though period pans were often shallower. A standard 12-cup muffin tin will serve; depending on the size of the tin, expect roughly two dozen small cakes.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, which was normal in a book written for cooks judging a range by hand. Small butter cakes of this kind belong at 350–375F, and fifteen minutes at that heat is about right for a two-thirds-filled patty pan.
- The cornstarch is the pointThree parts cornstarch to one part flour gives almost no gluten, which is what makes the crumb so short and fine. Do not substitute more flour for convenience — the cake becomes an ordinary pound cake.
- The egg methodBeating the yolks into the stiff whites, then adding that to the creamed butter, is the reverse of the more usual order. Fold rather than stir, and add the sifted dry ingredients gradually, as the recipe directs, or the aerated eggs collapse and the cakes bake dense.
- SaltNone is listed. If your butter is salted, none is needed; with unsalted butter add about 1/4 teaspoon to the sifted dry ingredients.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons is a generous amount, and the powders of the period were single-acting, releasing their gas on mixing rather than in the oven. If your cakes rise too fast and crack, try 1 1/2 teaspoons.
- ServingPlain, or with a thin lemon or vanilla glaze. They stale quickly because of the high starch, and are best the day they are baked.
"Plunket" is often said to be an old English name for a small rich cake, though the word has also been linked to the surname Plunkett; it turns up in American cookbooks through the nineteenth century attached to recipes of the pound-cake family, usually baked in little tins rather than a loaf. The attribution here is to Sarah Tyson Rorer, principal of the Philadelphia Cooking School and one of the most widely read cookery writers in the United States around 1900; promotional cookbooks issued by flour millers commonly carried recipes from such authorities to lend weight to the brand. The heavy use of cornstarch reflects a real fashion of the period — corn starch cakes, silver cakes and similar white, fine-crumbed confections were prized precisely because a soft, tender crumb was hard to achieve with the hard-wheat flours then coming out of the Minneapolis mills that produced Gold Medal.