Silver Cake
teaspoon salt cup milk 8 egg whites 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon almond extract Follow directions for mixing Butter Cake. Bake in loaves or rounds in a moderate oven.
A white butter cake leavened with beaten egg whites and flavored with almond — the pale half of the old silver-and-gold pair. The mixing method is borrowed wholesale from the book's plain Butter Cake, so the only real decisions left to the cook are oven heat and how the whites go in.
- Moderate ovenSet the oven to 350F. A period "moderate" oven runs 350-375F; the lower end is safer for a batter carried by egg white, which browns and dries quickly.
- The whites are the hingeBeat them to soft, glossy peaks — not stiff and dry — and fold them into the finished batter in two or three additions with a spatula, never a beater. Overbeaten or stirred-in whites collapse and the loaf bakes dense and streaked.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons is high by current habit; the flour quantity is not given on this page, so judge it against the Butter Cake recipe the directions point to. Use a modern double-acting powder and check it is fresh; the tartrate and other single-acting powders of the period gave up much of their gas in the bowl, so batters were generally got into the pan quickly.
- Almond extractOne teaspoon of pure almond extract is assertive in a white cake, which is the point. Imitation extract tastes different and can read harsher; add cautiously and adjust to taste.
- Loaves or roundsDepending on the size of the Butter Cake batter you are following, expect roughly two 8-inch rounds or one 9x5 loaf. Allow something like 25-30 minutes for rounds and 45-55 for a loaf, but test with a skewer in the center rather than going by time.
- The eight yolksThey were not meant to be wasted. Paired white-and-yellow cakes were the usual arrangement, and if the book carries a Gold Cake it will take the yolks; otherwise they keep a day or two covered for custard or similar uses.
- Milk and pan prepBring the milk to room temperature so it does not seize the creamed butter. Butter the pans and line the bottoms with parchment.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate maker, and like most manufacturer cookbooks of the early 1900s it surrounds its chocolate recipes with a full domestic repertoire. Silver Cake belongs to a nineteenth-century American convention of paired cakes: a white cake built on egg whites and a yellow one built on the leftover yolks, so that a dozen eggs produced two cakes and nothing was thrown out. Almond extract often flavored the white half, whose appeal lay in its colorlessness at a time when refined white flour and sugar were still worth showing off. The instruction to "follow directions for mixing Butter Cake" is typical of the period's editing, which leaned on cross-references between recipes rather than repeating them.