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White Loaf Cake
Whites of 8 eggs 1¼ cups granulated sugar 3/4 cup butter 1/2 cup water 2½ cups pastry flour 21/2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1 teaspoon vanilla Sift flour once and measure, add baking powder and sift three times. Sift sugar, then measure. Cream butter and sugar thoroughly. Beat whites of eggs until very stiff. Add to creamed butter and sugar, then flour and water alternately, then flavor and stir very hard. Bake in ungreased mold in slow oven until raised to top of pan, then increase heat and brown. Bake 40 to 60 minutes.
A butter cake leavened twice over: chemically with baking powder and mechanically with stiff egg whites. The old wording obscures a few things worth settling before you start.
- The hinge: how you add the whitesThe instruction to "stir very hard" is period language for thorough mixing of a stiff batter, and taken literally it will knock the air out of eight beaten whites. Fold the whites in with a light hand, then fold in flour and water alternately; stop as soon as the last streak of flour disappears.
- Oven temperaturesA slow oven is 300-325F. Start there, and once the cake has domed and set, raise to 350-375F to colour the top. Total time 40-60 minutes as given; test with a skewer at 40.
- Pastry flourPastry flour is softer than modern all-purpose. Cake flour is the closest substitute, or replace two tablespoons in each cup of all-purpose with cornstarch. The direction to sift three times after adding the baking powder is worth following: it breaks up the flour and distributes the leavening evenly.
- The ungreased moldThe recipe says only "ungreased mold" and does not specify a shape; the title points to a loaf, though a tube pan also suits a batter told to rise to the top of the pan. Leaving it ungreased is deliberate, so the batter can climb the sides. A butter cake is heavier than an angel food and does not always cling well; a round of parchment on the base makes turning out easier without defeating the purpose.
- Sifting the sugarGranulated sugar of the period was more prone to lumping than modern sugar, and sifting before measuring gave a lighter, more consistent cup. Modern granulated needs no sifting, but do not pack the cup.
- Eight egg whitesAbout one cup, or 240 ml, from large modern eggs; roughly 240-265 g by weight. Eggs of the period were not graded as consistently as modern ones, so measuring by volume is safer than counting.
- Baking powderCalumet was a double-acting powder of the alum-phosphate type; any modern double-acting baking powder will behave much the same. Two and a half level teaspoons to two and a half cups of flour is in line with ordinary practice.
- YieldEnough batter for a large mold - a 9- or 10-inch tube pan or a big loaf tin; serves about 12. Let it cool in the pan before turning out.
Reliable Recipes was a promotional cookbook issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, which is why the brand name appears inside the ingredient list rather than as a generic instruction; booklets of this kind were given away free in very large numbers in the first decades of the twentieth century and helped standardise American home baking around chemical leavening. The cake itself belongs to a long-lived pair: a white or "silver" cake using only the whites, and a gold cake made with the leftover yolks, so that a thrifty kitchen used the whole egg across two bakes. Whites-only cakes were prized for their pale crumb, which showed off refined white sugar and soft white flour.