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Snow Cake (C flour Vanilla t Royal baking)
½ C flour Vanilla 1 t (Royal) baking powder Salt 4 egg whites Cream sugar and butter, add milk, stir well; add salt, vanilla, flour and baking powder. When all these are mixed well, add stiffly beaten egg whites, folding in gradually. Turn into layers and bake 30 minutes in an oven at 375 degrees.
Blanche Triggs.
A white layer cake typical of church-supper collections, printed here with its ingredient list badly truncated — the method calls for sugar, butter and milk that never appear in the list. Read the points below before you start.
- Missing quantitiesOnly the flour (1½ cups), baking powder (1 teaspoon), salt, vanilla and four egg whites are given. Sugar, butter and milk are used in the method but their amounts were dropped in typesetting. Contemporary white cakes of this size run roughly 1 cup sugar, ½ cup butter and ½ cup milk, but that is a reconstruction, not what the book says.
- "C" and "t"C is a cup, t is a teaspoon. In books of this vintage a capital T would mean tablespoon; the distinction is easy to lose in small print, and here the baking powder is certainly a teaspoon.
- Royal baking powderThe brand call-out reflects the era's advertising and the fact that baking powders varied in strength; Royal was a cream-of-tartar type. Any modern double-acting powder works at the same measure.
- Folding techniqueThis is a whites-only cake, so lift comes from the beaten whites as well as from the teaspoon of baking powder. Beat the whites to firm but not dry peaks and fold in three additions, stopping while a few streaks remain rather than stirring smooth.
- Baking timeThe recipe gives 30 minutes at 375F for the layers. Thin layers may be ready sooner, so test with a skewer and pull them as soon as the centre springs back — an overbaked white cake dries out fast.
- Pan preparationThe recipe says nothing about preparing the tins. Butter and flour the pans, or line the bases with parchment; a lean white batter sticks readily.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many layers or what size; a batter built on 1½ cups flour would give roughly two thin layers, eight to ten servings. It is clearly meant to be filled and iced, and a boiled white frosting would be a period-appropriate choice.
Snow cake belongs to the large family of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century white cakes — silver cake, angel cake, bride's cake — that use only egg whites for the sake of a pale crumb, leaving cooks with a bowl of yolks and a reason to make custard or gold cake the same afternoon. Naming Royal baking powder in the ingredient list is a habit found in many community cookbooks of this period, when baking powders varied in strength and cooks named the brand they trusted. The signature at the end, Blanche Triggs, is the usual form of such books, in which recipes were contributed under the contributor's name.