Gold Cake
Beat well the yolks of eight eggs, one cupful of granulated sugar, one-quarter of a cupful of butter, one-half cupful of sweet milk, one and one-half cupfuls flour, one teaspoonful baking powder.
Cream butter and sugar together. Beat the yolks thoroughly, then stir in the butter and sugar; add the milk, then the flour, and stir hard. Bake in a cake mold about forty minutes.
A plain butter cake built on egg yolks alone, the traditional partner to a silver cake made with the whites. The method is unusual — the yolks are beaten first and the creamed butter and sugar stirred into them — and it works, but the batter is stiff and needs help.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as is usual in books of this kind. Forty minutes suits a moderate oven, 350F, in a tube or bundt pan; check at 30 minutes if you use two 8-inch layers.
- "Sweet milk"Ordinary fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the sour or buttermilk that appears in soda-raised recipes. Whole milk gives the closest result.
- Cake moldAny cake pan of roughly 6-cup capacity; a tube or turk's-head mold is one likely reading of the term. A center tube helps a deep pan bake evenly, but a plain pan or two layers will also work.
- Butter quantityA quarter cup is only 4 tablespoons for a cake with 1 1/2 cups of flour, so the yolks are carrying most of the richness. Have the butter genuinely soft or so little of it will not cream with a full cup of sugar.
- "Stir hard"The instruction is for a hand and a wooden spoon, and it means combine thoroughly, not develop gluten. With a mixer, add the flour and baking powder on low and stop as soon as no dry streaks remain.
- Baking powderOne teaspoon to 1 1/2 cups of flour is on the light side by current standards; sift it through the flour rather than dropping it in, so it disperses in a batter that gets very little mixing after.
- YieldOne 6-cup tube cake, about 10 slices.
- What to do with the whitesEight whites will make a silver cake or a boiled frosting for this one; an angel food generally calls for more.
Gold cake and silver cake are a matched pair that runs through American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century. The usual explanation offered is a practical one: a cook who separated eggs had both halves to use, the yolks going into a gold cake and the whites into a silver cake or a meringue frosting. The two batters were also sometimes marbled together in one pan. The use of chemical baking powder here, rather than saleratus with sour milk, points to the period after commercial baking powders had become cheap and widely available, from roughly the 1870s on.