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White Corn Cake
1/4 cup butter 1/2 cup sugar 1 1/3 cups milk Whites 3 eggs 1 1/4 cups white corn meal 1 1/4 cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt Cream the butter; add sugar gradually; add milk, alternating with dry ingredients, mixed and sifted. Beat thoroughly; add whites of eggs beaten stiff. Bake in buttered cake pan thirty minutes.
A sweet, cake-style cornbread lightened with beaten egg whites. The original assumes a cook who knows her own oven, so the one thing it omits is the temperature.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. Thirty minutes in a buttered cake pan suggests a moderate to moderately hot oven, somewhere around 375-400F; at that heat a full batter in a 9-inch square pan should be set and browned in about 30 minutes. Test with a skewer in the centre.
- Pan size"Cake pan" here means a single layer pan, either 8- or 9-inch square or round. The batter runs to roughly 5 cups, which fills a 9-inch square pan to a good depth and gives 9 to 12 squares.
- White corn mealWhite meal is milder and less assertive than yellow, and was the usual choice in much of the South; some Northern cookbooks of the period call for it as well. Yellow cornmeal works but shifts colour and flavour. Use a fine or medium grind; coarse stone-ground meal will read as gritty in a cake this delicate.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to 2 1/2 cups of dry ingredients is high by current practice but not out of range for the single-acting powders of the period. Modern double-acting powder at that level can leave a faint metallic edge; 1 tablespoon is closer to present usage.
- Mixing orderThe butter-and-sugar creaming, then alternating milk with the sifted dry ingredients, is standard cake method. Fold the stiff whites in last with a light hand: they are the only structural lift beyond the powder, and overworking them gives a dense, damp crumb.
- Egg whitesBeat to stiff but not dry peaks. Three whites is roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup if you are measuring from a carton. The three leftover yolks keep a day or two, covered, for custard or mayonnaise.
- ServingSweet enough to stand as a tea cake, but it belongs on the supper table with butter while still warm. Cornmeal breads tend to stale quickly, and this is best the day it is baked.