Gold Cake
3/4 cup butter 1 cup sugar Yolks of 2 eggs 2 cups flour 3/4 cup milk 3 teaspoons baking powder Little grated nutmeg Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; add the eggs, then the sifted flour and baking powder alternately with the milk. Flavor with a little grated nutmeg.
A plain butter cake written for a cook who already knew what to do with it: the original gives no pan, no oven temperature and no baking time. Those gaps are the main work here.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F. In a greased and floured 8- or 9-inch square pan or loaf pan, allow 35-45 minutes; as two 8-inch layers, 25-30 minutes. It is done when a skewer comes out clean and the cake pulls slightly from the sides.
- Butter measure3/4 cup butter is 1 1/2 sticks, 6 oz. Have it genuinely soft, near 65F, or the creaming stage will not aerate and the crumb will be dense.
- Only two yolksMany gold cakes of the period call for a larger number of yolks, and two is lean for 2 cups of flour; expect a paler, closer crumb than the name promises. Four yolks is a defensible reading if you want the colour, though the recipe as printed works.
- Baking powder3 teaspoons to 2 cups flour is more than a modern recipe would use. Recipes of this vintage commonly call for more powder than we now do, and an opened tin loses strength on the shelf; with fresh double-acting powder, 2 teaspoons gives a better rise and less risk of a metallic aftertaste.
- No salt listedThe recipe calls for no salt, and salted butter may well have been assumed. If yours is unsalted, add 1/4 teaspoon salt with the flour or the cake tastes flat.
- AlternatingAdd flour and milk in three and two additions respectively, beginning and ending with flour, and mix only until each disappears. Overworking after the milk goes in develops gluten and toughens the crumb.
- NutmegGrate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg from a jar is a different and duller spice. A quarter teaspoon is about right for this quantity.
- YieldOne 8-inch square cake, roughly nine to twelve servings. A plain finish or a light boiled icing suits it better than a heavy buttercream.
Gold cake exists because silver cake exists. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cake baking was organised around the problem of leftover eggs: a white cake, angel food or a boiled white icing consumed the whites and left the yolks behind, and the gold cake was one of several answers to what to do with them. The pair were sometimes served together, sliced in alternating layers or checkerboarded in a single pan. Cake sections in cook books of the period tend to read exactly like this one, with no oven temperature and no timing, because the wood or coal range in the reader's kitchen had no dial and the baker judged by hand and by eye. The three teaspoons of baking powder mark the recipe as belonging to the era after chemical leavening had thoroughly displaced beaten eggs as the lift in a plain cake.