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Devon Cake
1/4 cup soft butter 3/4 cup sugar 1/2 cup milk 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 1/2 cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder Mix and sift the flour, sugar and baking powder together. Put the egg whites, butter, vanilla and milk together, and beat with a Dover egg beater until light. After this, stir in the dry ingredients. Turn into a loaf tin, or bake in layers.
A plain white butter cake from the era when leftover egg whites were a standing household problem. The ingredient list omits the eggs themselves, so the first decision is yours.
- The missing eggsThe list gives no quantity of whites, though the method calls for them. Comparable white cakes of the period often run to about three whites for 1 1/2 cups flour; treat that as a reasonable reading rather than the author's stated amount.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater. A hand mixer on medium does the same work in less time; the point is to get air into the butter, milk and whites before the flour goes in.
- The unusual methodThis is not creaming. Butter, milk, vanilla and whites are beaten together first, then the sifted dry ingredients stirred in. Stir only until no dry flour remains, or the cake toughens.
- Soft butter mattersCold butter will not disperse into the milk and will leave lumps that bake into greasy pockets. Let it come fully to room temperature.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to 1 1/2 cups flour is high by modern standards but not out of range for a period cake with no whole eggs. Use double-acting powder and check it is fresh; stale powder is a common cause of a flat white cake.
- Oven and tinNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F: about 25 minutes for two 8-inch layers, 45 to 55 minutes for a loaf tin, until a skewer comes out clean.
- YieldTwo thin 8-inch layers or one small loaf, serving perhaps six to eight. It is a lean cake and best eaten the day it is made, or iced to hold the moisture.
Cakes made with whites alone were a practical answer to a bookkeeping problem: custards, curds, mayonnaise, noodles and gold cakes all took yolks and left whites behind, and before refrigeration those whites had to be used within a day or two. Whole chapters headed "Whites of Eggs" appear across late nineteenth and early twentieth century American cookbooks for exactly that reason. The name Devon suggests the English county and its dairy reputation, though such names were freely applied to plain cakes by publishers and flour companies and rarely indicate an actual regional origin.