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Golden Orange Cake
1/4 cup butter 7/8 cup flour 1/2 cup sugar tsp. Royal baking powder 1/4 cup milk 1 tsp. orange extract 5 egg yolks Cream butter, add sugar, then extract and egg yolks beaten light. Mix and add alternately other ingredients with the milk.
— Mrs. Albert Tattersall
A small, rich yolk cake from a church fundraiser book, written for cooks who already knew how to bake and needed only the proportions. Two things are missing and must be supplied: the oven temperature and the pan.
- The baking powder amount is incompleteThe baking powder amount is missing -- the original reads "tsp. Royal baking powder" with no number, most likely a lost numeral. For 7/8 cup flour, 1 teaspoon is a conventional proportion of the period, and more than that risks an off, soapy taste in so small a batter.
- 7/8 cup flourOne cup less two tablespoons, about 110 g. Flour of the period was often softer and lower in protein than modern all-purpose, so cake flour may give a texture closer to what was intended.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; the recipe assumes the cook's judgment, and few coal or wood ranges carried a reliable gauge. 350F, a moderate oven, suits a butter cake of this size.
- Pan and yieldThis is a single small cake, not a layer set. An 8-inch round or a small loaf pan will hold it; start checking at about 20 minutes at 350F, until a tester comes out clean. It will serve around six.
- Royal baking powderA cream-of-tartar powder and one of the leading national brands of the era. Modern double-acting powder can be substituted one for one.
- Five yolks, no whitesThe whites are not folded in and not called for. The batter will be dense, close-grained and deep yellow rather than airy. Beat the yolks until pale and thick, as "beaten light" instructs; they aerate the batter along with the creamed butter and the baking powder.
- Orange extractExtracts of the period were alcohol-based and could be strong. A teaspoon of modern extract is assertive but reasonable; the finely grated zest of one orange added with the sugar gives a rounder flavor without altering the liquid balance.
- Alternating the additionsAdd the flour mixture and milk in alternating portions, beginning and ending with flour, mixing only until combined. With this little flour, overworking shows up immediately as toughness.
Yolk cakes like this one exist because of their opposites. Angel food and white mountain cakes, both fashionable by the 1890s, consumed six to twelve egg whites at a stroke and left the cook with a bowl of yolks and no refrigeration worth the name. "Golden" cake, sometimes called gold cake, was the standing answer, and it turns up in community cookbooks of the period alongside the angel food it was meant to accompany. The Philathea books were compiled by the Baraca-Philathea class movement, which began at a Syracuse, New York Baptist church in the 1890s, with the Philathea classes for young women dating from 1893 and spreading widely in the following decades, and their recipes carry contributors' names as a matter of course: a woman's cake was known by her, and putting Mrs. Albert Tattersall's name beneath it was both credit and endorsement. The named brand of baking powder is a period fingerprint too, from the years when trusting a particular tin was part of the recipe.