Yellow Cake
8 yolks. 2 cups sugar. 3/4 cup butter. 3 cups flour. 1 cup sweet milk. 1 tablespoon cornstarch. 3 teaspoons baking powder. Webb's orange flavor.
This is a proportions-only recipe of the kind that filled newspaper cookery columns: the reader was expected to know the butter-cake method already. Everything below fills in what the list leaves out.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter with the sugar until pale and light, beat in the yolks a few at a time, then add the sifted flour, cornstarch and baking powder alternately with the milk in three or four additions, ending with flour. Stir only until smooth; overworking after the milk goes in toughens the crumb.
- Oven and pansNo oven temperature or pan is given in the original; 350F is a reasonable modern equivalent for a butter cake. The batter is large: it will fill two 9-inch round layers (roughly 30-35 minutes), a 10-inch tube pan (50-60 minutes), or a 9x13 sheet (about 40 minutes). A skewer in the centre should come out clean and the cake should pull slightly from the sides.
- Sweet milkThis means ordinary fresh milk, specified only to distinguish it from the soured milk or buttermilk used in soda-leavened cakes. Whole milk is the closest match.
- Webb's orange flavorEvidently a proprietary orange flavouring extract of the period; it does not appear to be sold under that name now. Use 1 to 2 teaspoons of orange extract, or the finely grated zest of a large orange plus a teaspoon of vanilla.
- No salt in the listButter of the period was commonly salted, and salt is frequently absent from printed ingredient lists of this kind. If using unsalted butter, add about 1/2 teaspoon fine salt to the flour.
- The cornstarchOne tablespoon sifted in with the flour lowers the overall protein slightly and gives a finer, more tender crumb. It is not a thickener here and should not be increased.
- Eight yolksThat is roughly 1/2 cup of yolk from large eggs, and it is what makes the cake yellow. The whites keep three or four days refrigerated, or freeze; a white cake or a meringue frosting is the obvious use for them.
- FilingThe recipe appears here under Vegetables, which looks like a misplacement rather than anything to do with the cake.
Yellow or "gold" cake existed as the twin of white or "silver" cake: a white cake took only whites and a gold cake only yolks, so the pair were often baked together to use up both halves of the egg. Mrs. Wilson wrote for Philadelphia newspaper readers in the years around the First World War, and her recipes reflect that format -- a bare column of proportions, the method assumed, and a proprietary flavouring named outright. The reliance on chemical baking powder rather than beaten whites places this in the twentieth-century American butter-cake tradition; the tablespoon of cornstarch is a domestic stand-in for soft-wheat cake flour, which was already being sold commercially by this date.