Lady Cake
14 ounces of granulated sugar. 12 ounces of butter. 12 ounces of white of eggs. 1 pound of flour. 2 teaspoonfuls of flavoring extracts. 1/2 teacup of milk. The juice of one small lemon.
Use uncolored dairy butter. Warm the sugar and butter slightly and stir them till white and creamy. Add the egg whites a little at a time and after that the flour.
Don't beat the white of eggs before mixing, but beat the whole mixture thoroughly after the flour is in. Then mix in the lemon juice and flavoring and last of all the milk.
A professional baker's white cake, given in weights rather than cups and leavened entirely by creamed butter and unbeaten egg whites. The proportions work, but a few of the assumptions behind them need translating.
- Weigh, don't scoopThe ratios only hold by weight: 14 oz sugar (about 2 cups), 12 oz butter (3 sticks), 1 lb flour (roughly 3 1/2 cups, but scale it). Use a kitchen scale and the cake behaves.
- 12 ounces of egg whitesA large egg white runs about 1 oz, so that is 11-12 whites. Cartoned liquid egg whites work and are easier to weigh accurately.
- Uncolored dairy butterButter of the period was often tinted with annatto, which would tint a white cake. Most modern unsalted butter is pale enough that the instruction matters much less.
- The flavoring extractLady cake was commonly flavored with almond, sometimes with rose water. Two teaspoons of almond extract is assertive but suits the style; period recipes sometimes called for bitter almond or peach-kernel water, which modern extract safely replaces.
- No chemical leaveningThere is no baking powder here. Lift comes from air worked into the butter and sugar and from the whites, so the creaming stage is the hinge: cream until genuinely pale and fluffy, five to eight minutes in a stand mixer, and add the whites slowly so the batter never breaks.
- "Beat thoroughly after the flour is in"Likely written for a softer flour than modern all-purpose, and for a hand-beaten batter. With modern all-purpose flour, beat only until smooth and homogeneous; cake flour will give a closer approximation of the intended crumb.
- Warming the butter and sugarThis means bringing the butter to about 65-70F so it creams, not melting it. Melted butter will not hold air and the cake will be dense.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given; the oven was left to the cook's judgement. Bake at 325-350F. The batter comes to roughly 3 1/2 lb, enough for two 9-inch layers (35-45 minutes) or a large tube or loaf pan (60-75 minutes); test with a skewer.
- YieldAbout 16 servings. The crumb is firm and close rather than airy, and it keeps well wrapped for several days.
Lady cake belongs to a family of white cakes that ran through American baking from the mid-1800s onward, the counterpart to the yolk-rich "gold" cake; the two are often said to have been baked from a single dozen eggs split between them, and marbled together the white and gold became silver-and-gold cake. The name is generally taken to refer to the cake's delicacy and pallor rather than to any particular lady. The recipe gives its ingredients in ounces and pounds, with no oven temperature stated because the baker was expected to know his own oven. The insistence on uncolored butter is a small window onto the period's dairy trade, when annatto-tinted butter was the commercial norm and a baker wanting a truly white crumb had to specify otherwise.