Home › Cookery › Corn Starch Cake
Corn Starch Cake
1 cup butter. 2 cups sugar. 1½ cups corn starch. 2 cups flour. 1 cup milk, perfectly sweet. 1/2 teaspoonful soda. 1/2 teaspoonful cream tartar. Beat the sugar and butter together. Dissolve the soda and corn starch in the milk; put the cream tartar in the flour. Mix these well, and then add the whites of eight eggs well beaten.--Mrs. S.
A white butter cake of the type usually called silver cake, leavened with soda and cream of tartar rather than baking powder. The original assumes a cook who knows her own oven and needs no times or pan sizes.
- Fold the whites, do not beat them inThe whites of eight eggs are the only lift this cake has beyond the chemical leavening. Whip them to soft peaks and fold them into the finished batter in two or three additions; stirring them in flattens the crumb into something dense and gummy.
- Soda and cream of tartarEqual half-teaspoons here act as a single-acting baking powder, though the usual proportion is twice as much cream of tartar as soda. Get the cake into the oven promptly, as the reaction begins the moment the acid flour meets the alkaline milk.
- "Milk, perfectly sweet"Sweet means fresh and unsoured, not sugared. With the soda already balanced against cream of tartar, milk that had turned would add acid of its own and upset that balance.
- Dissolving cornstarch in milkWhisk the cornstarch into cold milk until no lumps remain, then add the soda. Keep the milk cold rather than heated, so the starch stays a smooth slurry.
- OvenNothing is given. A moderate oven, 350F, is right for a cake of this richness.
- Pan and timeThe batter is large: about eight cups. Use a 10-inch tube pan, 60 to 70 minutes, or two 9-inch layers at 30 to 35 minutes. Test with a straw or skewer in the center.
- FlavoringNone is specified. A teaspoon of vanilla, or half a teaspoon of almond, suits the plain white crumb; add it with the milk.
- Yield and the leftover yolksServes 12 to 16. Eight yolks remain; period cookbooks commonly set such yolks against a gold cake, a boiled custard or a curd.
Cornstarch cake belongs to the family of white or "silver" cakes that spread through American cookbooks after refined cornstarch became a commercial grocery product, available from the 1840s and 1850s onward; the starch replaces part of the wheat flour, which weakens the gluten and gives a notably fine, tender, pale crumb. Its appearance in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), Marion Cabell Tyree's compilation of contributions from Virginia housewives, shows the book's method: dishes are credited to their contributors, and the instructions assume a reader who already knows what a cake batter should look like. The recipe also reflects a kitchen economy in which eight whites were not wasteful but half a transaction, the yolks going straight into a companion cake or custard.