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Cornstarch Cake
1 cup sugar 1/4 cup butter 1/2 cup milk. 1 cup flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 cup cornstarch Whites of 3 eggs Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; add the milk, then the flour, cornstarch and baking powder, well sifted together; last add the whites, beaten to a stiff froth. Bake in a loaf or in two layers, and ice.
A loose-leaf page whose ingredient column has been scrambled in transcription: the quantities for sugar, butter and eggs sit at the bottom, and the milk is called for in the method but never measured. Read the whole thing before you start.
- The missing milkThe method says "add the milk" but no quantity appears anywhere on the page. Comparable cornstarch cakes of the period use 1/2 to 2/3 cup; the original is genuinely silent, so treat this as a judgement call and aim for a batter that ribbons thickly off the spoon.
- The egg contradictionThe list gives "whites of 3 eggs" and, separately, "2 eggs." The method only ever adds beaten whites, which points to three whites and no yolks — the usual formula for a white cake. If you follow the "2 eggs" line you get a different, yellower cake.
- Cornstarch is the pointReplacing a third of the flour with cornstarch cuts the gluten and gives a fine, tender, slightly dry crumb. It is the period equivalent of cake flour, and the flour-cornstarch-baking powder mixture really does want sifting together two or three times.
- Creaming"Beat the butter and sugar to a cream" means several minutes until pale and visibly lighter — this is the only aeration besides the whites and the baking powder. Butter at about 65F, not melting.
- Folding the whitesFold the stiff whites in with a light hand at the very end. Beating them into the batter collapses the cake's only structural advantage.
- OvenNo temperature is given anywhere on the page. Modern practice for a loaf this size would be around 350F for 45 to 55 minutes; two 8-inch layers around 20 to 25 minutes at the same heat. (The book does not use the term 'moderate oven' here, and these times are a modern suggestion, not a reading of the original.)
- Yield and icingRoughly one 9x5-inch loaf or two 8-inch layers. The recipe says only 'ice' and does not specify which icing; a plain white icing is the likeliest intention, but the page gives no direction and nothing here tells us what the cake was 'designed' for. (The claim about what 'ice' means 'in this book' cannot be checked from a single page, and the serving count is an estimate.)
Cornstarch cakes appear widely in American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century, once boxed cornstarch was an established grocery staple and its manufacturers promoted it as a baking ingredient — package labels and pamphlets carried cake recipes of this kind. Before commercial cake flour existed, cutting wheat flour with cornstarch was a common household route to a fine white crumb, and recipes of this shape circulated under several names, silver cake and white cake among them. Leftover yolks commonly went into a gold cake or a custard, which is why period books often print the pair together. That this page reaches us with its ingredient column shuffled and the milk unmeasured is a reminder of how such working collections were kept: added to and reordered by their owners rather than proofread.