White Cake
3/4 cup butter 1 cup milk 4 egg whites 3 cups flour 1¼ cups sugar 3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1 level teaspoon salt Cream butter and sugar. Add milk alternately to flour, baking powder and salt, sifted thoroughly. Add whites of eggs or fold in, last, stirring gently. Use any flavoring to suit taste.
A plain butter-and-egg-white layer cake from a baking powder company's promotional booklet, written for cooks who already knew how a cake was baked. Everything about the oven, the pan and the timing has been left out, so those are the gaps to fill first.
- Oven and panBake at 350F. The batter fills two 9-inch round pans or one 9x13; rounds take about 25-30 minutes, the sheet about 35, until a skewer comes out clean and the edges pull from the sides.
- The egg whitesThe instruction to "add whites of eggs or fold in" is ambiguous; it appears to allow the whites in unbeaten, or beaten and folded. Beaten and folded is the safer choice for the lighter, whiter crumb the name promises.
- Alternating properly"Add milk alternately to flour" is shorthand for the standard method: with the creamed butter and sugar in the bowl, add the sifted dry ingredients in three additions and the milk in two, beginning and ending with dry. Mix only until each addition disappears.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was an alum-phosphate powder and the modern product is double-acting, so any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes one for one. Three level teaspoons for 3 cups of flour is in line with current practice of about 1 teaspoon per cup.
- FlourCake flour will give a finer crumb; if using all-purpose, remove 2 tablespoons per cup and replace with cornstarch.
- Flavoring"Any flavoring to suit taste" suggests roughly 1 to 2 teaspoons of extract. Almond, or almond with vanilla, is a common choice for a white cake; vanilla alone contributes a little colour.
- Yield and leftover yolksServes 10 to 12. Four yolks are left over: they keep two days covered in the refrigerator and go straight into custard, curd or an enriched pastry dough.
Reliable Recipes was one of the free booklets issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, founded in 1889 and generally said to take its name from the Calumet region south of the city. Booklets like this were advertising in the shape of a cookbook: the recipes name the brand, and the measurements are given in "level teaspoons" at a time when standardized level measuring was itself being promoted by the chemical leavening firms. White cake, made with whites only, belongs to the same family as angel food and silver cake, all of them turning on a household's ability to spare four yolks.