Cornflour Cake
INGREDIENTS for 12 small cakes.-6 oz. of cornflour, 6 oz. of sifted sugar, 4 oz. of butter, 3 eggs, flavouring of vanilla. AVERAGE COST, 1s. Melt the butter, add the other ingredients, and beat for 20 minutes. Butter some small tins (large patty pans will do), put in the mixture, and bake at once in a good oven.
TIME.- hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A plain butter-and-egg cake made entirely with cornflour rather than wheat flour, so it is incidentally gluten-free. It has no raising agent at all: the long beating is the whole method.
- Cornflour means cornstarchIn British usage cornflour is the fine white starch sold in the United States as cornstarch, not cornmeal and not maize flour. Substituting either of the latter will give a gritty, heavy cake.
- Weights6 oz cornflour is about 1 1/3 cups; 6 oz sifted sugar is closer to 7/8 cup granulated (more again if you use the lighter icing sugar); 4 oz butter is one US stick. Weighing is worth the trouble here, as cornflour packs unevenly in a cup.
- The beating is the leaveningWith no baking powder, all the lift comes from air beaten into the batter. A stand mixer will reach the same point in appreciably less time than twenty minutes of hand beating, so judge by eye: the mixture should be pale and visibly aerated before it goes into the tins.
- Melted butter, then work fastBecause the fat is melted rather than creamed, the emulsion is fragile and the air escapes as it stands. "Bake at once" is a real instruction, not a flourish.
- A good ovenThe book gives no temperature. A 'good oven' is usually read today as somewhere in the 350-400F (180-200C) range; these are small cakes, so a reasonably brisk bake suits them.
- Baking timeThe original time has not survived intact. For patty-pan or bun-tin cakes of this size, expect 15-20 minutes: they are done when set, faintly coloured, and springing back to a light touch.
- TinsLarge patty pans are shallow bun tins; a standard 12-hole bun or muffin tin filled about two-thirds is the closest modern equivalent. Butter them well, as the recipe directs.
- Texture and keepingThe crumb is short, sandy and very tender, closer to a sponge finger than a cupcake. It dries out fast and is best eaten the day it is made.
- Cost"1s." is one shilling for the whole batch, a period price note rather than anything a cook needs to act on.
Cornflour cakes appear all through late-Victorian and Edwardian household books because refined maize starch was cheap, brilliantly white, and heavily advertised by firms such as Brown & Polson, whose packets came with recipe leaflets promoting exactly this sort of baking. Cooks were encouraged to use the new starch in place of some or all of the wheat flour in cakes and puddings, on the grounds that it produced a lighter, finer crumb. This version goes the whole way and drops wheat entirely, which is why the recipe leans so hard on prolonged beating rather than a raising agent. It also explains the entry's place in the alphabetical run of the book, alongside cornflour blancmanges, moulds and custards that a modern reader would recognise as thickened starch puddings.