Velvet Cake
1/2 cup butter 1½ cups flour 1½ cups sugar Yolks 4 eggs ½ cup cold water ½ cup corn-starch 4 teaspoons baking powder Whites 4 eggs 1/3 cup almonds, blanched, and shredded Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, yolks of eggs well beaten, and water. Mix and sift flour, corn-starch, and baking powder, and add to first mixture; then add whites of eggs beaten until stiff. After putting in pan, cover with almonds and sprinkle with powdered sugar. Bake forty minutes in a moderate oven. 1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar Yolks 3 eggs 1/2 cup milk ½ teaspoon salt
A butter cake lightened with cornstarch and stiff-beaten whites, finished with almonds baked right onto the top. The transcription has suffered in places, so read the ingredient list critically before you start.
- Garbled fractionsThe repeated "1½" for water and cornstarch is very likely a mangled "1/2": note that both read "cup" rather than "cups," as does the salt line. A cake with 1 1/2 cups of each against 1 1/2 cups flour would not hold together. Read them as 1/2 cup cold water and 1/2 cup corn-starch.
- The stray tailEverything from the second "1/2 cup butter" onward belongs to the next recipe in the chapter and has bled into this one. Ignore it; this cake takes no milk and the salt figure is not usable as printed.
- Moderate ovenThe original gives no temperature; "moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F. Forty minutes suits a single 8-inch square or a shallow tube pan; test with a skewer at 35 minutes, since the cornstarch makes the crumb tender and easy to overbake.
- Why cornstarchReplacing part of the flour with cornstarch lowers the protein and gives the fine, close, tender crumb the name promises. Modern cake flour does the same job — substitute 2 cups cake flour for the flour and cornstarch together if you prefer.
- Folding the whitesThe batter is stiff by the time the dry ingredients go in. Loosen it with a third of the beaten whites before folding in the rest, or you will knock the air out working the first spoonful through.
- Blanched almondsPour boiling water over whole almonds, stand two minutes, and the skins slip off; shred them lengthwise with a knife while still damp. Sliced almonds from a packet are a reasonable stand-in.
- The toppingAlmonds and powdered sugar scattered on raw batter sink slightly and then crisp into a thin glaze. Watch the last ten minutes — sugar over nuts colors fast at that heat, and a loose sheet of foil will stop it browning further.
- YieldAbout ten servings. It keeps two or three days well wrapped and is better on day two, when the crumb has settled.
Cakes called "velvet" appear across late nineteenth-century American cookbooks and the name describes texture rather than any fixed formula — the shared trick is cutting the wheat flour with cornstarch, which was cheap and widely marketed for exactly this purpose after cornstarch manufacture is generally said to have become a large American industry in the 1840s and 50s. It belongs among the butter cakes that depend on chemical leavening and separately beaten whites. The almond-and-powdered-sugar top is a plain-cook's alternative to frosting: it bakes on and needs no cooling time.