Home › Biscuits, Breakfast Cakes, Etc › White Corn Cake
White Corn Cake
1/4 cup butter. 1/2 cup sugar. 1 1/3 cups milk. Whites 3 eggs. 1¼ cups white corn meal 1¼ cups flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt Cream the butter; add sugar gradually; add milk, alternating with dry ingredients, mixed and sifted. Beat thoroughly; add whites of eggs beaten stiff. Bake in buttered cake pan thirty minutes.
A plain white-meal corn bread from the quick-bread chapter, leavened with baking powder and lightened with beaten egg whites. Several of the wet-ingredient quantities are missing from the printed list, so treat the proportions below as guidance and work from a complete corn cake recipe if you want exact amounts.
- Missing quantitiesThe list as printed gives only the meal, flour, baking powder and salt; the butter, sugar, milk and egg whites called for in the method have no amounts attached. Comparable corn cakes of this type commonly run to roughly a quarter cup butter, a quarter cup sugar, a cup of milk and two egg whites for this much dry ingredient, but that is inference, not the book's figure.
- The cornmeal measureThe first line has lost its fraction. Read alongside the 1 1/4 cups flour, it is most likely 1 1/4 cups white corn meal, which would make the meal and flour equal.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A moderately hot oven, in the region of 400F, suits a batter of this thickness for the thirty minutes stated; judge by the colour of the top and a clean tester.
- Egg whites onlyUsing stiff whites rather than whole eggs is what keeps the crumb white and open. Fold them in at the very end, in two additions, and stop as soon as no streaks show -- "beat thoroughly" applies to the batter before the whites go in, not after.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons reads as a great deal by modern standards. If the cornmeal is indeed 1 1/4 cups, that is four teaspoons to about 2 1/2 cups of dry ingredients; with current double-acting powder you may prefer to reduce it, since too much leaves a bitter aftertaste.
- Pan and yieldThe recipe specifies only a buttered cake pan; an 8-inch square or 9-inch round is a reasonable modern choice, and either will cut into squares. Serve warm.
Corn bread appears in two broad forms in nineteenth-century American cookbooks: a plain skillet bread of meal, liquid and fat, and a richer "corn cake" enriched with butter, sugar, wheat flour and eggs. This recipe belongs to the second, and it was likely meant as a hot bread served in squares. Preferences for white or yellow meal did vary by region and by mill, and yellow meal was sometimes disparaged in genteel kitchens, though the geography is not as tidy as it is often made out. Beating the whites separately to lighten a heavy meal batter is a technique borrowed from cake making.