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Olympic Dinner Dishes (White Layer Cake cup butter)
White Layer Cake 1/2 cup butter (scant) 1⅞ cups Olympic Flour 1¼ cups sugar 1/2 cup milk 2 teaspoons baking powder 5 whites of eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla Stir Add Cream the butter and sugar. alternately the milk and the flour, into which has been sifted the baking powder. Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth and fold in last. Flavor with the vanilla; spread in two layers and bake in quick oven.
For Gold Cake, beat yolks very hard, until creamy, then add 1 tablespoon of boiling water and beat again. Repeat with one more tablespoon of water.
A standard turn-of-the-century white butter cake, printed with its instructions slightly scrambled by the typesetter. The steps run: cream butter and sugar, add milk and flour alternately, fold in the beaten whites, flavor, bake in two layers.
- That flour figure"17/8 cups" is 1 7/8 cups — one and seven-eighths, or 1 3/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons. Olympic was a Pacific Northwest brand, and the region's soft white wheat suggests a fairly soft all-purpose flour; modern all-purpose works, though cake flour gives a finer crumb.
- Quick ovenPeriod tables put a quick oven somewhere around 400–425F, hotter than a butter cake really wants. For two thin layers the practical reading is 375F for 20–25 minutes; anything hotter domes and cracks them before the center sets.
- Scant half cup of butterAbout 100–110 g, just under a full stick, i.e. a little under 8 tablespoons. Have it genuinely soft, since a scant amount of fat creamed cold will not hold air with this much sugar.
- Folding orderThe text says the whites go in last, with the vanilla mentioned afterwards; the scrambled printing leaves the exact order of flavoring and folding unclear. Beat the whites to a stiff but still glossy froth — beaten dry, they break into lumps that leave tunnels.
- Egg sizePeriod eggs are generally reckoned to have run smaller than today's large eggs, so four large whites (around 120–130 g) may be the closer match; five modern whites will loosen the batter.
- Pan sizeThe recipe says only "two layers"; two 8-inch rounds is the usual reading. No frosting is given, and a boiled white icing or a plain confectioners' sugar frosting would suit.
- The Gold Cake noteEvidently a companion recipe substituting yolks for the whites, with two tablespoons of boiling water beaten in to lighten them. The page gives no further method, so the rest of the proportions are presumably as above.
This comes from a flour-company giveaway, one of hundreds of small cookbooks issued by American millers and grocers around the turn of the twentieth century. Olympic was a Pacific Northwest flour brand, and the point of such a book was less to teach cookery than to get the brand name into every measurement line, which is why the flour is specified by name and nothing else is. The pairing of a white cake with a gold cake below it reflects genuine kitchen economy rather than variety: a cake built on five whites leaves five yolks, and a thrifty kitchen would have found a use for them. White layer cakes rose in status through the late nineteenth century alongside cheap refined sugar, chemical baking powder and reliably white bolted flour emov=