Lily Cake
1/3 cup butter. 1 cup sugar. 1/2 cup milk. 1 3/4 cups flour. 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder Whites 3 eggs 1/3 teaspoon lemon extract 2/3 teaspoon vanilla Follow recipe for mixing butter cakes.
The text as printed is a fragment: the ingredient list has been mangled in transcription, leaving only the leavening, egg whites and flavourings. The notes below cover what can be said with confidence and where the gaps lie.
- The list is incompleteA butter cake needs butter, sugar, milk and flour, none of which survive in this entry. Anyone wanting to bake it should work from a complete white butter-cake formula rather than trying to fill the blanks by guesswork.
- "21½ teaspoons baking powder" is a transcription errorNo cake takes that quantity. The intended figure was probably 2½ or 1½ teaspoons, with the stray digit run in from an adjoining measurement; the fragment does not let us say which.
- What "mixing butter cakes" meantThe standard butter-cake method of the period is: cream the butter, add sugar gradually, then add the liquid and the sifted flour-and-baking-powder alternately, and fold in the stiffly beaten whites last.
- Egg whites onlyThree whites and no yolks, with lemon and vanilla rather than spice as the flavouring. The leftover yolks will keep for a custard or a gold cake.
- OvenThe fragment gives no baking direction. A butter cake of this sort would be baked in a moderate oven; on a modern dial that is around 350F, with the time depending on whether it is baked as a layer or a loaf.
- YieldWith the flour, sugar and liquid missing from the entry, the yield cannot be fixed; three whites would suit a small single layer or loaf.
Late nineteenth-century American cookbooks carry long runs of butter cakes distinguished mainly by their flavouring and by whether they use whole eggs, yolks or whites, and "Lily Cake" belongs to the white-cake family, the name often said to come from its colour: whites only, no spice, no molasses, nothing to tint the crumb. Such cakes became practical for ordinary households only after reliable commercial baking powder spread in the second half of the nineteenth century, which let a cook lean on chemical leavening instead of relying entirely on beaten egg. The pairing of lemon and vanilla extract is also of its moment, when bottled flavouring extracts were cheap, heavily advertised, and a mark of a modern kitchen. The habit of writing "follow recipe for mixing butter cakes" rather than repeating the method each time was common to cookbooks of the period, and it is one reason such books read as teaching texts: the method was to be learned once and applied across dozens of variations.