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Corn-starch Cake
1 cup butter 4½ teaspoons baking powder 2 cups sugar Whites 5 eggs 1 cup milk ¾ teaspoon vanilla or ½ teaspoon almond extract 1 cup corn-starch 2 cups flour Follow recipe for mixing butter cakes. This mixture makes two loaves.
A white butter cake of the 1890s, lightened with cornstarch in place of part of the flour. The ingredient list was set in two columns in the original and reads scrambled in a single line; sorted out, it is 1 cup butter, 2 cups sugar, 1 cup milk, 1 cup corn-starch, 2 cups flour, 4½ teaspoons baking powder, the whites of 5 eggs, and flavouring.
- Why cornstarchReplacing a third of the flour with cornstarch cuts the gluten and gives a finer, more tender, whiter crumb. The principle is much the same as that of modern cake flour, which is milled from soft, low-protein wheat; cake flour throughout is a reasonable substitute, though the crumb may not be quite the same.
- Baking powder quantityThe printed page gives 4½ teaspoons, as our text now reads. That is generous by modern standards for the 3 cups of flour and corn-starch; about 3 teaspoons will raise the cake well.
- "Follow recipe for mixing butter cakes"The standard procedure of the period: cream the butter, add sugar gradually and beat until light, add the milk alternately with the sifted dry ingredients, then add the stiffly beaten egg whites last. Fold the whites in rather than beating them, or they collapse and the cake bakes dense.
- FlavouringThe alternatives given are ¼ teaspoon vanilla or 1½ teaspoons almond extract. The almond figure is oddly large beside the vanilla and may be a misprint. Modern almond extract is potent, so half that amount is plenty.
- Pans and ovenTwo loaves means two standard loaf pans, buttered and floured, or a pair of 8-inch round layers. No oven heat is given; 350F works, roughly 45 to 55 minutes for loaves, 25 to 30 for layers, until a skewer comes out clean.
- Egg whites left overFive yolks are left unused. Keep them covered in the refrigerator and use within two days.
- YieldTwo loaves. Unfrosted, well wrapped, it should keep a couple of days; boiled white icing would suit it.
Cornstarch cakes appear all through American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century, and they belong to the era when commercial corn starch — Kingsford's and its competitors — became a cheap pantry staple used well beyond laundry starch and blancmange. The placing of such a cake among the butter cakes is telling: soft, fine-crumbed white cake was the aspirational cake of the late nineteenth century, and before reliable cake flour was sold, diluting bread flour with starch was how a home cook got there. The heavy dose of baking powder and the use of whites alone both point to the same goal, a pale, high, even loaf that looked like the cakes in the bakery window.