Rainbow Cake
Whites 4 eggs. 1 cup sugar. 1/2 cup milk. 1/2 cup butter. 2 cups flour. 2 teaspoons baking powder.
Flavor with orange, vanilla and lemon. Take out portion and tint pink with color paste. Mix in with white to make a pretty pink and white cake.
The instructions here are little more than a shopping list; the method is assumed. This is a standard white butter cake with part of the batter tinted and marbled back in.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter and sugar, add the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk, then fold in the whites beaten to soft peaks. The whites go in last and are folded, not stirred, or the crumb turns tough and dense.
- Oven temperatureMrs. Wilson gives none. A cake of this size wants a moderate oven, 350F, for 25 to 30 minutes in two 8-inch layers or 35 to 40 in a single pan.
- ButterHalf a cup is one stick, 4 ounces. It should be soft enough to take a thumbprint but not melting, or it will not hold air during creaming.
- Flavoring quantities"Flavor with orange, vanilla and lemon" most likely means extracts, and the amounts are left to the cook. Roughly half a teaspoon of each suits a two-cup-flour cake; much more and the three flavors fight.
- Color pasteA concentrated paste coloring, comparable to the gel colors sold today for icing. Paste tints without thinning the batter as liquid drops would. A very small amount on the tip of a knife is enough for the pink.
- MarblingSpoon the white and pink batters into the pan in alternating dollops and draw a knife through them once or twice. Repeated swirling blends the two into a uniform blush and loses the effect entirely.
- YieldAbout two 8-inch layers, or one 9-inch square; eight to ten servings. The recipe specifies no frosting.
- Leftover yolksFour yolks come out of this recipe. They keep a day or two covered with a film of water in the refrigerator and go into custard, mayonnaise or a gold cake.
Rainbow and marble cakes were a fixture of American home baking from the late nineteenth century onward, and depended on two things arriving in the ordinary kitchen at once: reliable chemical baking powder, which made a fine even white crumb possible without hours of beating, and commercial food coloring cheap enough to use for fun. A white cake showing off nothing but egg whites and refined flour was itself a small display of means, since the yolks had to be spent elsewhere. Mrs. Wilson wrote for Philadelphia newspaper readers and for the U.S. Food Administration during the First World War, and her books favor exactly this kind of compressed, list-like entry that assumes the reader already knows how a butter cake is put together.