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American White Cake
Work a couple of ounces of butter into a cream, beat up the whites of half a dozen eggs in half a pint of milk, adding a pound of flour, a teaspoonful of cream of tartar, and half a teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda, mixing the butter with the flour, and rubbing it in thoroughly, then make into a dough with the milk and eggs. Butter a square cake-tin, and pour in the mixture, baking in a quick oven for an hour. Then brush over the top with the white of eggs, and sift caster-sugar over it, replacing in the oven for two or three minutes.
A very lean nineteenth-century plain cake, and one whose printed text has at least one gap worth knowing about before you start. Read the notes on sugar and oven heat first.
- There is no sugar in the batterAs printed, the mixture is unsweetened; the only sugar in the recipe is the caster sugar sifted over the glazed top. This may well be an omission in the original setting, since comparable white cakes of the period are usually sweetened at the creaming stage. If you want a cake rather than a sweet-crusted bread, add sugar to taste at the creaming stage.
- Oven heat and time contradict each otherA "quick oven" is generally reckoned somewhere around 400-450F, and a cake of this size is unlikely to survive an hour at that heat. Bake at 350F and start testing at 40-45 minutes; a deep 8-inch square may want longer, a shallower tin less.
- Weights and measuresA pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups; half a pint of milk is one US cup, or 10 fl oz if the source is using imperial measure; a couple of ounces of butter is half a stick. Note how little fat and liquid this is against the flour, which is why the text calls the result a "dough."
- It really will be stiffOne cup of milk plus six whites will not pour. Expect a thick batter you spread with a spatula rather than something that flows into the corners of the tin.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTogether these are the components of baking powder, and the acid also helps keep the crumb white. If you substitute, 2 teaspoons of double-acting baking powder stands in for the pair here.
- Rubbing butter into flourThe text is self-contradictory here: it opens by working the butter to a cream, then directs you to mix the butter with the flour and rub it in before adding the liquid, which is a biscuit method rather than the creaming method used for later white cakes. Rubbing in gives a shorter, denser crumb; if you add sugar, creaming butter and sugar first will give a lighter cake.
- Caster sugarSuperfine sugar. Ordinary granulated works but sits more visibly on the crust; a few seconds in a food processor gets you close.
- The finishBrushed egg white and sugar returned to a hot oven for two or three minutes sets into a thin crackled meringue glaze. Watch it, as it colors quickly and the cake is already baked.
- Tin and yieldAn 8- or 9-inch square tin, buttered and preferably lined. Cuts into 12 to 16 squares.
White cakes belong to the second half of the nineteenth century, when finely milled flour, cheap refined sugar and reliable chemical leaveners made a pale, fine-grained crumb an ordinary domestic ambition rather than a luxury. Cooks of the period are often said to have baked in pairs: a "silver cake" from the whites and a "gold cake" from the leftover yolks, so that nothing was wasted. Cream of tartar with bicarbonate of soda was the standard leavening before packaged baking powder became universal, and the acid had the incidental virtue of keeping the crumb from yellowing.