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White Cake No. 2
3 eggs. 1/2 cup butter. 1 1/2 cups sugar. 2 1/2 cups flour. 2 teaspoons baking powder. 2-3 cup milk.
Flavor with Webb's orange and lemon.
This is a proportions list rather than a set of instructions, which was normal in Mrs. Wilson's books — she expected the reader to know the standard butter-cake method. Here is what the list assumes.
- The method it leaves outCream the softened butter with the sugar until pale and light, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the sifted flour and baking powder alternately with the milk in three or four additions. Stop mixing as soon as the batter is smooth; overworked batter after the flour goes in gives a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- "2-3 cup milk"This is almost certainly a typesetting of 2/3 cup, which suits the fat, flour and sugar quantities here. Two to three cups of milk would be batter for a pudding, not a cake.
- Webb's orange and lemonApparently a proprietary citrus flavouring extract of the period; it is no longer on the market. Use about 1 teaspoon orange extract and 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract, or the finely grated zest of one orange and half a lemon creamed in with the butter.
- Why it is called whiteWhole eggs give a pale yellow crumb. For a genuinely white cake use the whites of 4 to 5 eggs, whipped to soft peaks and folded in at the end; that is the version the name usually refers to.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. A cake of this size wants a moderate oven, about 350F.
- Pans and timeEnough batter for two 8-inch round layers, 25 to 30 minutes, or one 9x5-inch loaf, 45 to 55 minutes. Grease and line the bases. Done when the centre springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- Flour and baking powderFor a finer crumb substitute cake flour, or replace 2 tablespoons of each cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder for 2 1/2 cups flour is on the low side but workable; the cake will be close-textured rather than airy.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and the Philadelphia papers around the First World War, and her books are full of stripped-down ingredient lists like this one — economical to print, and aimed at readers who already knew how to cream butter and sugar. Cakes raised on whipped egg whites were well established in American cookbooks by the later nineteenth century, helped along by refined white flour, granulated sugar and commercial baking powder, and in better-off households by egg whites left over from custards and dressings. Branded flavouring extracts such as the Webb's called for here were a standard grocery line of the era, when citrus oils in alcohol were the practical way to flavour a cake outside the season for fresh fruit.