White Cake
Take one cup of sugar; one-half cup of butter; one-half cup of milk; one cup of flour; one-half cup of cornstarch; two teaspoons of baking powder; three eggs (whites). Rub the butter and sugar to a cream and add the milk. Sift the flour, cornstarch and baking powder together, and add them, beating well. Lastly stir in the whites of the eggs beaten to a stiff froth, and bake for one-half hour in a well-buttered tin and a moderately quick oven. A flavoring may be added in mixing, if desired.
A small, plain white cake of the standard early-1900s type, lightened with cornstarch and egg whites. It works as written, but the oven and pan instructions need translating.
- Oven temperatureA "moderately quick oven" is about 375F. At half an hour that suits a single 8-inch round or an 8-inch square pan; the cake is done when a skewer comes out clean and the top springs back.
- Pan size and yieldThe batter comes to roughly 3 cups, enough for one 8-inch layer or about a dozen cupcakes (18-20 minutes for cupcakes). Doubling it gives two layers for a filled cake.
- Cornstarch flourOne cup flour plus half a cup cornstarch is the period way of making a soft, low-protein flour. If you use modern cake flour instead, substitute 1 1/2 cups for the flour-and-cornstarch pair; with all-purpose flour keep the cornstarch.
- Butter measureHalf a cup of butter is one stick, 4 oz. Have it soft but not melting or the creaming will not hold air.
- "Rub to a cream"This is creaming, and it is the hinge of the recipe: beat butter and sugar three to five minutes with a mixer until pale and fluffy. All the lift not coming from the baking powder comes from here and from the whites.
- Folding the whitesAdd the milk gradually to the creamed butter so it does not curdle, then fold the stiff whites in by hand in two or three additions. Beating them in, as the word "stir" might suggest, collapses them and gives a dense crumb.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons for 1 1/2 cups of dry ingredients is generous by modern standards; 1 1/2 teaspoons of a current double-acting powder is closer to the intended effect.
- FlavoringThe unnamed flavoring would have been vanilla, almond or lemon extract. A teaspoon, beaten in with the milk, is right for this quantity.
White cake — made with whites only, so the crumb stays pale — became a household ambition once chemical leavening and cheap refined sugar and flour were widespread in the later nineteenth century; before that a truly white, fine-grained cake signalled both expensive ingredients and a cook with time to beat egg whites by hand. The cornstarch trick in this version is characteristic of the period: American home cooks softened ordinary flour by replacing part of it with starch, at a time when reliably milled cake flour was not yet a fixture on grocery shelves. Butterick, which sold dress patterns, also published cookbooks aimed at supplying the middle-class housewife with standardised, repeatable instructions. Leftover yolks could be turned to gold cake, custard or mayonnaise.