Home › Desserts › Simple Butter Cake
Simple Butter Cake
3 cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 4 egg whites 1 teaspoon flavoring 1 teaspoon salt Follow directions for making Butter Cake, and bake in a loaf in a moderate oven forty minutes, or in rounds twenty minutes.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it lists only the parts that differ from the book's master Butter Cake, and assumes you have that page open. Read it as an amendment.
- The list is incomplete by designNo butter, sugar or liquid appears here because they come from the base Butter Cake formula. Substitute these quantities into that recipe — the four whites replace whole eggs, and the flour and baking powder figures supersede the originals.
- Whites onlyFour whites in place of the base recipe's eggs give a paler crumb and cleaner flavour. The recipe itself gives no separate handling instruction; it says only to follow the Butter Cake method.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F in modern terms. A loaf at that temperature for forty minutes is plausible; start testing at thirty-five.
- "In rounds"Layer pans, greased and floured or lined. The recipe does not say how many or what size; three cups of flour will fill more than two shallow tins.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to three cups of flour is a little above the usual ratio of about a teaspoon per cup. Three teaspoons gives ample lift with contemporary double-acting powder.
- "Flavoring"Cookbooks of this period use the word to mean an extract: vanilla, lemon or almond. Vanilla is the usual default reading.
- Yield and donenessEnough batter for one loaf or a set of layers; the recipe gives no pan size or serving count. Done when the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean; the pale crumb makes colour an unreliable guide.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard — one of a great many turn-of-the-century cookbooks issued by food firms to put their product in domestic kitchens. Its structure reflects the cooking-school method then dominant in New England: a master formula stated once, followed by short variation entries like this one that change only a line or two. The white butter cake itself belongs to the era when chemical leavening and cheap refined sugar had made the plain layer cake an everyday item rather than an occasion, and when a cake made with whites alone signalled refinement.