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Potato-Flour Cake
Yolks of 4 eggs 1 cup sugar. 1/2 cup potato flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon vanilla Whites of 4 eggs Beat the yolks of the eggs very light with the sugar; add the potato flour and baking powder; flavor; fold in the whites carefully and pour the mixture into a buttered tin. Bake in a very slow oven for about thirty-five minutes. 1 pound butter 1 pound sugar 1 pound flour
This is a loose-leaf page that has lost part of itself: the ingredient list gives no sugar quantity and no yolk count in the list, though the method calls for both, and the three lines of pound-cake proportions at the end belong to a different recipe. What survives is a recognisable potato-flour sponge, and it can be reconstructed with care.
- The missing sugarThe method beats yolks with sugar but no amount is printed. Comparable potato-flour sponges vary, using anywhere from about half a cup to a full cup of sugar to 1/2 cup potato flour and 4 eggs; whatever you choose is an inference, not the original.
- The stray pound-cake line"1 pound butter, 1 pound sugar, 1 pound flour" is a fragment of a separate pound-cake formula that has drifted onto the page. Do not add butter to this batter; it is a fatless sponge leavened by egg.
- Potato flour is potato starchWhat the book calls potato flour is the fine white starch sold today as potato starch, not the buff-coloured dried-potato flour in the gluten-free aisle. They are not interchangeable; the latter absorbs far more liquid and will produce a heavy, damp cake.
- The baking powderThree teaspoons to half a cup of starch is very heavy leavening by modern standards and will give a soapy edge and a coarse crumb. One teaspoon is nearer current practice for a batter already aerated with four whipped whites.
- A very slow ovenPeriod tables vary, but "very slow" generally falls around 250-275F. Potato starch sets gently and browns readily; a hotter oven crusts the top before the centre is set.
- The hinge: foldingThere is no butter and no gluten here, so the whites carry most of the structure, the baking powder aside. Beat them to firm but still glossy peaks and fold in thirds with a light hand -- deflate them and the cake bakes heavy and flat.
- The tin"A buttered tin" for this quantity means roughly an 8-inch round or a small loaf. Butter it and dust with a little potato starch; a sponge this delicate sticks.
- Yield and servingAbout eight small slices. It is dry-eating on its own, and sponges of this kind were often served with stewed or fresh fruit, a fruit sauce, or lightly sweetened cream.
Potato starch entered home baking as a way around wheat. It appears in Central and Eastern European Passover baking, where sponge cakes leavened with beaten egg and bound with potato starch have long been standard, and it turns up again in American and British cookbooks of the First World War years, when wheat flour was rationed or urged upon households as a thing to conserve. The cake is characteristic of that kind of baking: no butter, no wheat, and most of the lift coming from four eggs well beaten -- though this page also calls for baking powder. The loose-leaf format is worth noting -- pages were meant to be pulled out, added to and rearranged, which may be how this one came to carry another recipe's proportions at the bottom.