Silver Cake
One-half cup of butter; one and one-half cups of milk; two and one-half cups of flour; four eggs (whites); two teaspoons of baking powder. Place the ingredients together the same as for loaf cake, adding the whites of the eggs, well beaten, at the last. Bake in a well-buttered tin for forty minutes.
A white cake built on egg whites alone, printed in the terse style Butterick used once the method had been given elsewhere in the chapter. Read the ingredient list closely before you start.
- The list is missing sugarAs printed there is no sweetener at all, and the milk quantity is high for the flour. Other silver cake recipes of the period generally call for a substantial quantity of sugar and rather less milk, so a line may well have been dropped or garbled in typesetting. Follow a complete version rather than the text as it stands.
- "The same as for loaf cake"This most likely points back to the standard creaming method given for loaf cake elsewhere in the chapter: cream the butter with the sugar, add the milk alternately with the flour sifted with the baking powder, then fold in the whites last. The instruction assumes you have already read the loaf cake entry.
- Oven heatThe recipe specifies no oven heat. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits this batter; forty minutes at that heat fits a single layer or a shallow square tin, while a deep loaf will want closer to an hour and a skewer test.
- Egg whitesBeat to soft, glossy peaks rather than stiff and dry, and fold in two or three additions. Whites beaten until they look grainy will not incorporate and leave streaks of cooked albumen in the crumb.
- Baking powder of the periodBaking powder of this date was often single-acting, releasing its gas as soon as it was wetted rather than again in the oven's heat. Two teaspoons to two and a half cups of flour is a little below today's usual ratio, but no adjustment is needed -- just get the batter into the oven promptly.
- "Well-buttered tin"Butter and flour the tin, or line the base with parchment. A white cake batter this lean in fat sticks readily, and there was no non-stick pan when this was written.
- Yield and the leftover yolksThis is a large quantity of batter, enough for a loaf tin or two shallow layers rather than a single thin one. The four leftover yolks could go into a gold cake, a custard or a boiled dressing on the same baking day.
Silver cake and gold cake were a matched pair in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American baking: one used only the whites of the eggs, the other only the yolks, so that a thrifty cook broke a single set of eggs and produced two cakes of contrasting colour. The pairing appears in household manuals from the 1870s onward and became a fixture of the layer cake, where pale and yellow rounds were stacked under a white icing. The very pale crumb depended on evenly bolted white flour, commercial baking powder, and cheap refined sugar, and a snow-white cake was still worth showing off. Butterick, a firm known for its dress patterns, aimed the book at a middle-class housekeeper who wanted the fashionable thing done economically, which is exactly what the gold-and-silver pair delivered.