Silver Cake
1½ cups sugar 1/3 cup butter 4 whites of eggs
— Mrs. John Legg
2/3 cup milk 1 cup Reliable flour 1 cup pastry flour salt and flavoring Cream sugar and butter, add unbeaten egg whites, one at a time, add milk and flavoring, and lastly flour (sifted before measuring), and salt.
— Mrs. L. L. Hopkins
A plain white butter cake of the sort that shared a page with its "gold cake" partner, made to use up whites left from a yolk-heavy recipe. It is a small cake by modern standards and needs a little interpretation before it goes in the pan.
- No leavening is listedAs printed, the ingredient list has no baking powder or soda, and a creamed butter cake with unbeaten whites will bake dense and close-grained without it. Many printed silver cakes of the period do include baking powder sifted with the flour, often on the order of 2 teaspoons for this much flour.
- Reliable flourApparently a brand-name white flour of the period; set against the pastry flour in the same list, it stands for the stronger of the two. Substitute plain all-purpose flour cup for cup.
- Pastry flourSoft, low-protein flour, roughly 8-9 percent. If you have none, use all-purpose flour with two tablespoons per cup replaced by cornstarch.
- Sift before measuringThe instruction is not decorative. Sifted-then-measured flour weighs close to 4 oz per cup; scooped straight from the bag it can run 5 oz, which is enough to turn this into a dry cake.
- Unbeaten whites, one at a timeThe whites go into the creamed butter and sugar unwhipped, exactly as yolks would in a yellow cake. Add each one fully before the next or the batter will break; if it curdles, a spoonful of the flour will bring it back.
- FlavoringThe recipe leaves it open. Almond extract was a common choice for silver cake, with vanilla or lemon as alternatives; a scant teaspoon is enough for this quantity.
- Oven and panThe recipe specifies neither temperature, pan nor time. Around 350F is a reasonable modern reading, baking until the center springs back.
Silver cake and gold cake were a matched pair in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks: the silver used the whites, the gold used the yolks. Church and society cookbooks like this one, compiled from members' handwritten cards, tended to print both within a page or two of each other, each credited to whichever woman had contributed her version. The white cake also carried a certain prestige, since bleached white flour, refined sugar and plenty of eggs signaled a well-stocked kitchen; the fashion for it is generally traced to the spread of chemical leavening and finely milled flour in the second half of the 1800s.