Home › Cake › Royal Cream Loaf Cake
Royal Cream Loaf Cake
1/2 cup shortening 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 1 teaspoon lemon extract or other flavoring 1/2 cup rich milk or thin cream 1 cup flour 1/2 cup corn starch 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder Cream shortening well; add sugar slowly; add yolks of eggs which have been well beaten; add flavoring; add milk a very little at a time; sift flour, corn starch and baking powder together and add; fold in beaten whites of eggs. Bake in greased loaf pan in moderate oven 35 to 45 minutes, and cover with frosting.
A plain butter-cake batter lightened with cornstarch and separated eggs. Nothing in it is obscure, but the leavening and the oven wording both need translating.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is 350F (175C). At that heat a loaf this size will take the full 35 to 45 minutes; test with a skewer in the centre.
- Baking powder quantityThree teaspoons for a cup of flour plus half a cup of cornstarch reflects the single-acting cream-of-tartar powder Royal sold at the time, which released most of its gas on contact with liquid. With modern double-acting powder, 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons gives the same lift without the soapy aftertaste and coarse crumb that over-leavening produces.
- ShorteningThe recipe does not say which fat to use; butter, lard or vegetable shortening were all possible. Butter gives the best flavour here; whichever you use, it must be soft enough to cream to a pale fluff, which supplies part of the cake's aeration alongside the folded whites and the baking powder.
- The cornstarchSubstituting cornstarch for a third of the total flour cuts the gluten and gives a tender, close crumb. Cornstarch was one common period stand-in for soft cake flour. If you use cake flour instead, use 1 1/2 cups of it and drop the cornstarch.
- Rich milk or thin creamWhole milk or half-and-half. Adding it "a very little at a time" matters: dumping in cold liquid will break the creamed butter and sugar into curds.
- Folding the whitesBeat the whites to soft, not stiff, peaks and fold them in last with a light hand. Stiff peaks fold in as lumps and leave streaks of dry white in the baked loaf.
- Pan and yieldA standard 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 inch loaf pan; grease and line the base. The batter is modest, roughly 10 to 12 slices. Cool completely before frosting or the icing will slide.
The New Royal Cook Book was one of the great promotional cookbooks of the early twentieth century, published by the Royal Baking Powder Company to keep its cream-of-tartar product in American kitchens at a time when cheaper phosphate and alum powders were taking market share. Recipes like this one name the brand in the ingredient list as a matter of course. The dish is distinguished by the cornstarch, which stood in for the soft, low-protein cake flour that was not yet standard in every pantry. The instruction to reserve and fold in the whites separately marks it as a cake meant to look refined on a plate rather than an everyday one-bowl mixture, and the closing direction to "cover with frosting" presumably assumes the reader could turn to an icing recipe elsewhere.