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White Almond Cake
One-half cup butter, one and one-half cups sugar, one teaspoon almond extract, one-half cup milk, one and one-half cups pastry flour, one-half cup cornstarch and two teaspoons baking powder, stiffly beaten whites of five eggs. Sift together the flour, cornstarch and baking powder and add alternately with the milk. Mix in the order given and bake in a moderate oven.
A plain white butter cake in the old style, with the instructions compressed to almost nothing. The order of operations is the whole recipe: cream the butter and sugar, beat in the extract, add the flour mixture alternately with the milk, and fold the whites in last.
- Moderate oven350F. A cake this size in an 8- or 9-inch tube pan takes roughly 45-55 minutes; two 8-inch layers take 25-30. It is done when the centre springs back and a tester comes out clean.
- Fold, do not stirThe five stiffly beaten whites are the only lift beyond the baking powder, and the batter is stiff enough to knock the air straight out of them. Lighten the batter with a spoonful of the whites first, then fold in the rest in two or three additions.
- Pastry flourSofter and lower in protein than modern all-purpose. Cake flour is the closest substitute measure for measure; with all-purpose, replace two tablespoons of each cup with additional cornstarch.
- The cornstarchHalf a cup alongside a cup and a half of flour further softens the crumb and keeps the cake white. It is not a thickener here and should be sifted with the flour, not added separately.
- Almond extractA full teaspoon is assertive by current standards; half a teaspoon gives a cleaner almond note. Imitation extract, which is benzaldehyde-based, is stronger than natural extract.
- Butter and saltHalf a cup is one stick. The recipe calls for no salt at all; if using unsalted butter, a quarter teaspoon added to the dry ingredients will not go amiss.
- Creaming"Mix in the order given" begins with butter and sugar beaten until pale and light, which takes three to four minutes with a stand mixer. Skipping this step gives a dense cake, since the whites alone will not carry it.
- YieldEnough for two 8-inch layers or one tube cake, serving 10 to 12. The five leftover yolks keep several days refrigerated and go into custard or curd.
White cakes made with egg whites only were a fixture of American cookbooks from the 1870s onward, arriving with cheap chemical baking powder and finely bolted white flour, both of which are generally credited with making a pale, fine-grained crumb more readily achievable in a home kitchen. Whiteness was the point: it signalled refined flour, plenty of eggs and a cook with yolks to spare, and it took tinted icings cleanly. Cornstarch cakes were a related fashion, the starch cutting the flour's gluten to produce what recipe writers of the period called a "velvet" crumb. Almond extract was often used to flavour such cakes alongside rose and lemon, vanilla being neither as cheap nor as dominant as it later became. Recipes of this kind tended to be terse formula-style affairs, written for readers assumed to know already how a cake was mixed and what their own stove's moderate oven felt like.