Silver Cake
1 cup sugar 6 ounces butter Whites of 2 eggs 2 cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 cup cream 1 teaspoon vanilla Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; add the stiffly beaten whites of eggs, then the sifted flour and baking powder; last add the cream and flavoring.
A small white butter cake with no baking instructions at all — the original assumes you know what to do with a filled tin. Here is what needs translating.
- Butter measure6 ounces is 1 1/2 sticks, or 3/4 cup. Have it properly softened, around 65F, or it will not cream to the light, pale mass the method depends on.
- "Cream" means sweet creamAn unqualified "cream" in this period means fresh sweet cream, not sour cream or buttermilk, though period cream was not standardised and could be thinner than modern heavy cream. Since the leavening is baking powder rather than soda, no acid is wanted; heavy cream is a safe substitute.
- Mixing orderAs written the flour goes in before the liquid, which gives a stiff paste that then has to be thinned. Modern practice is to add the flour mixture and the cream alternately in two or three additions, which keeps the batter smooth without overworking the gluten.
- The egg whitesBeat them stiff but fold them in gently, and expect to fold again after the flour. Whites beaten to the dry, crumbly stage will not incorporate and leave white streaks in the crumb.
- SaltNone is listed; butter of the period was frequently salted, which may account for the omission. Add 1/4 teaspoon with the flour if your butter is unsalted.
- Oven and tinBake at 350F. The quantity fills two 8-inch layer tins (22-25 minutes) or one 8 1/2 by 4 1/2-inch loaf tin (45-55 minutes); a skewer should come out clean and the cake should just be shrinking from the sides.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 slices. As a two-layer cake it takes a plain white icing or a lemon filling; the flavour is deliberately mild.
Silver cake is half of a matched pair with gold cake, the pattern that runs through American cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward: the whites of the eggs go into one batter, the yolks into the other, so that a household using a dozen eggs wastes nothing. Silver cake is white-crumbed and vanilla- or almond-flavoured, gold cake yellow and often flavoured with lemon. The convention survives in the modern American distinction between white cake, made with whites only, and yellow cake. Its appearance in Mrs. Fryer's, alongside dozens of other plain butter cakes, reflects how much of a home baker's repertoire was small variations on one creamed-butter formula — the differences lying in the eggs, the liquid and the flavouring rather than in method.