Golden Cake
⅞ cup flour 1½ teaspoons baking powder Yolks 5 eggs 1/4 cup milk 1 teaspoon orange extract Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and yolks of eggs beaten until thick and lemon-colored, and extract. Mix and sift flour and baking powder, and add alternately with milk to first mixture. Omit orange extract, add one-half cup nut meat cut in small pieces, and bake in individual tins.
The ingredient list as printed here is incomplete — butter and sugar are called for in the method but never quantified, and half a cup of flour is far too little for five yolks. Treat this page as a record of the technique rather than a set of workable proportions, and note that the final sentence is not part of the cake but a variation on it.
- The missing quantitiesButter and sugar are called for in the method but never quantified, and the half cup of flour cannot be reconciled with five yolks and the given baking powder. Other printings of this cake carry larger flour and added butter and sugar quantities, but as printed here the amounts are genuinely ambiguous and should not be guessed at blindly.
- The last sentence is a separate cake"Omit orange extract, add one-half cup nut meat..." is the book's shorthand for a variation — a nut cake baked in small tins. It is not a step in the golden cake itself.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven temperature or time. A butter cake of this type is usually baked in a moderate oven, around 350F, and the small individual tins of the nut variation will bake faster than a single layer or loaf; judge by the cake rather than the clock.
- Why only yolksGolden cake exists to use the yolks left over from angel cake or a white cake, which take only whites. The yolks give the colour and a close, tender, slightly rich crumb rather than a light one.
- Beating the yolks"Thick and lemon-colored" means several minutes of hard beating — the yolks should fall from the beater in a ribbon. This is the aeration the cake depends on, since there are no whipped whites.
- Alternating flour and milkAdd the dry mixture and the milk in alternating portions, beginning and ending with flour, and stop as soon as each addition disappears. Overworking after the flour goes in toughens the crumb.
- Orange extractA teaspoon of modern extract is fine, but the finely grated zest of one orange gives a cleaner flavour.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no pan or yield beyond "individual tins" for the variation. With fuller proportions it would make a single layer or a small loaf, and the nut version a batch of small cakes.
Golden cake and silver cake are a matched pair that runs through American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward, and they are generally said to exist for reasons of thrift rather than fashion. Once whipped-white cakes — angel food above all — became popular in the 1870s and 1880s, a household that baked one was left with a bowl of yolks and no refrigeration worth the name to keep them in. Golden cake was the answer: yolks only, butter, and a flavouring strong enough to carry the richness, usually orange or lemon. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book includes both in its cake chapter, along with a great many one-line variations of exactly the kind seen in the final sentence here, where a change of extract and a handful of nuts turns one cake into another under a different name.