Snow Cake
1/4 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup milk 1 2/3 cups flour. 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder Whites 2 eggs 1/4 teaspoon vanilla or ¼ teaspoon almond extract Follow recipe for mixing butter cakes. Bake forty-five minutes in a deep narrow pan. ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar ½ cup milk 1 2/3 cups flour
A plain white butter cake leavened with baking powder and beaten egg whites, from the era when "snow" simply meant a cake with no yolks in it. The ingredient list as printed is out of order and one or two of the numbers have lost their fractions, so read the whole thing before you start.
- Read the ingredients firstThe list runs: ½ cup butter, 1 cup sugar, ½ cup milk, flour, baking powder, whites of 2 eggs, flavouring. The flour figure is almost certainly 1¾ cups; the baking powder figure is garbled as printed and cannot be read with confidence.
- FlavouringThe almond quantity prints as "14 teaspoon" and is almost certainly ¼ teaspoon, offered as an alternative to the ½ teaspoon of vanilla; almond extract is the stronger of the two.
- "Recipe for mixing butter cakes"The general rule this points to: cream the butter, add sugar gradually, then add the milk alternately with the flour sifted with the baking powder, and fold in the stiffly beaten whites last. Fold rather than stir.
- The pan and the timingA "deep narrow pan" points to something loaf-shaped rather than a shallow layer tin. Forty-five minutes is the given time, but test earlier with a skewer.
- Whites, not meringueBeat the whites only to firm peaks that still look moist. Taken to dry and grainy they will not fold in evenly and the crumb streaks.
- YieldOne small loaf. Wrap once cool.
Snow cake belongs to the family of white cakes that spread through American cookbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century, once reliable chemical leavening made it practical to raise a batter without whole eggs. Using only the whites gave a pale, fine crumb that photographed and plated as "white" against the yellow of a standard butter cake, and in some books the leftover yolks went into custards, sponge cakes or gold cake — several print gold and silver cakes side by side for exactly that reason. The name is descriptive rather than regional: it refers to colour, as with snow pudding and snowballs. Its presence here, in a section of nearly interchangeable butter-cake formulas, reflects a teaching cookbook's method of setting out one mixing technique and then varying the flavouring and the pan, which is why the instruction is simply to follow the general rule.