Gold Cake
One-half cup of butter One-half cup of milk Yolks of six eggs Two cups of flour Two teaspoons of Larkin Baking Powder Grated rind and juice of half a lemon or one-eighth teaspoon of Larkin Nutmeg Add the beaten yolks to the creamed butter and sugar; add the milk and flour with the Baking Powder.
A yellow butter cake built on egg yolks alone, written in the compressed style of a premium-catalogue cookbook that assumed the reader already knew how cake worked. Two things are missing outright and have to be supplied.
- The sugar is never measuredThe method says to cream butter and sugar, but no quantity appears in the ingredient list. For half a cup of butter, two cups of flour and six yolks, one cup of granulated sugar is a reasonable working amount, though cakes of this type were made with anywhere up to a cup and a half.
- No oven temperature or timeBake at 350F. Two 8-inch layers need about 25 minutes; a single loaf or tube pan closer to 40-45 minutes, until a tester comes out clean and the cake springs back.
- Pan and yieldThe batter fills two 8-inch round layers or one 9x5 loaf, and serves eight to ten. Grease and flour the pans, or line the bottoms with parchment.
- Larkin Baking PowderA house brand of the Larkin Company. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder is the right substitution for two cups of flour. The formulation of the Larkin powder is not stated, so it is safest to treat the batter as the period cook would have and get it into the oven promptly.
- FlourHousehold flour of this period was often a softer wheat than modern all-purpose, though the recipe specifies nothing beyond 'flour'. Cake flour gives a tender crumb; with all-purpose, remove two tablespoons per cup and replace with cornstarch.
- EggsSix yolks from modern large eggs come to about six tablespoons, a little over a third of a cup. Beat them until thick and pale before adding, as directed, and reserve the whites for the silver cake that traditionally accompanies this one.
- Mixing orderAdd the milk and flour alternately, in three or four additions, beginning and ending with flour. Adding all the milk at once to a yolk-heavy butter batter can cause it to break.
- FlavouringChoose one, not both: lemon rind and juice, or a scant eighth teaspoon of nutmeg. The recipe specifies the Larkin house spice; if you are grating a whole nutmeg instead, keep the quantity small, as freshly grated is noticeably stronger than the pre-ground jar.
Gold cake and silver cake were a matched pair in American baking from the late nineteenth century onward: one used the yolks, the other the whites, so a household that had broken a dozen eggs wasted nothing. The habit long predates refrigeration, when leftover whites or yolks could not simply be held over for the week. The Larkin brand names threaded through the ingredients place this book in the mail-order premium trade — the Larkin Company of Buffalo began in soap and expanded into groceries, spices and baking powder sold direct to housewives who earned furniture and china as premiums for their orders. Recipe booklets like this one were advertising as much as instruction, which is why the leavening and the nutmeg carry a brand name.