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Maple-Sugar Cake
½ cup butter or shortening
½ cup milk
1¼ cups maple sugar
1¼ teaspoons vanilla
6 tablespoons corn-starch
4 egg-whites
1/½ cups flour
Cream the butter or shortening and sugar. Sift the corn-starch and flour together several times and add to the first mixture, alternately with the milk. Add the vanilla, then fold in the stiffly beaten egg-whites. Bake in a greased loaf-cake tin in a moderate oven (380° F.) for forty-five minutes. Cover with any desired icing.
A white cake leavened almost entirely by beaten egg whites, sweetened with granulated maple sugar rather than cane. Two of the printed quantities need interpretation before you start.
- The flour quantity is garbled"1/½ cups flour" is a typesetting error. Given 6 tablespoons of cornstarch and half a cup each of butter and milk, 1½ cups flour is the most plausible reading; cornstarch and flour together then come to a little under two cups, in the manner of a homemade substitute for cake flour.
- There is no chemical leaveningThe recipe relies on four stiffly beaten whites alone. That is deliberate for a white cake of this period, but it means the folding is the hinge: work the whites in with a spatula in three additions and stop the moment no streaks remain. Overmix and the loaf comes out dense and rubbery with no baking powder to rescue it.
- Maple sugarThis means hard granulated or cake maple sugar, not maple syrup. If yours comes in a block, grate or process it fine and pack it lightly to measure, since lumps will not cream into the butter. Syrup cannot be substituted one for one without throwing off the liquid.
- The oven figure is unusually preciseThe recipe glosses "moderate" as 380° F. Treat it as 375°F on a modern oven and check at 40 minutes with a skewer.
- Creaming with maple sugarMaple sugar may not cream up as readily as cane. Cream thoroughly before adding anything else; that trapped air is part of the lift.
- Pan and yieldA greased loaf-cake tin here is roughly a 9x5-inch pan; the batter also suits an 8-inch round layer. Figure ten to twelve slices.
- Icing"Any desired icing" leaves the choice open. A maple boiled icing or a plain confectioners' glaze with a spoonful of maple keeps the flavour from being buried.
Maple sugar was the older product; maple syrup is generally said to have overtaken it commercially only as packaging and transport made a liquid sweetener practical to sell. Well into the nineteenth century, northeastern and Canadian sugarmakers boiled sap all the way down to a hard cake that stored and travelled without spoiling, and it is often said to have served rural households as an everyday sweetener where cane sugar had to be bought with cash. By the time Butterick issued this collection, maple sugar had shifted from a staple to a flavouring — hence a cake that treats it as the interesting substitution in an otherwise standard white-cake formula. The cornstarch-and-flour trick in the ingredient list is a period marker of its own: commercial cake flour existed but was not yet in every pantry, so cooks cut ordinary flour with starch to lower the protein and get a finer crumb.