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Cornstarch Cakes
Mix in a basin one breakfast cupful of cornstarch, one-half breakfast cupful of wheat-flour, one tablespoonful of sugar and two saltspoonfuls of salt. Dissolve one teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda in one-half teacupful of boiling water and pour it into three teacupfuls of sour milk; mix it with the dry ingredients and add two eggs well beaten. After buttering some small cake-tins, pour the preparation into the depth of about one and one-half inches and then bake for twenty-five minutes in a quick oven.
A quick-bread batter leavened by soda and sour milk, with cornstarch standing in for most of the flour. The result is closer to a tender muffin than a cake, and it depends entirely on speed once the liquids meet.
- Work fast once soda meets milkThe soda begins reacting with the acid in the sour milk the moment they combine, and the boiling water accelerates it. Have the tins buttered and the oven at temperature before you dissolve the soda, then mix and bake immediately; a batter left standing will bake flat.
- Cup measuresA breakfast cup is roughly 1 cup, sometimes a little more; a teacup is smaller, about 3/4 cup. Read the cornstarch and flour as 1 cup and 1/2 cup, and the sour milk as about 2 1/4 cups with a scant 1/2 cup (about 3/8 cup) boiling water.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon holds about 1/4 teaspoon, so two is 1/2 teaspoon of salt.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F, though period usage varies. At the lower end the interiors will set before the tops take too much colour, which matters with a batter this wet.
- Sour milkThis means milk soured naturally by lactic fermentation, as raw milk clabbers; modern pasteurised milk spoils with a different bacterial population and is not a reliable equivalent. Buttermilk is the standard modern replacement and supplies the acid the soda needs.
- What the cornstarch doesWith cornstarch at two parts to one of wheat flour there is very little gluten, so the crumb comes out fine, soft and fragile. Do not beat the batter to develop it; stir only until the dry ingredients are wet, and let the cakes cool a few minutes in the tins before turning them out or they will break.
- Tins and depthSmall cake-tins filled to an inch and a half means individual moulds or a standard muffin tin filled nearly full. Twenty-five minutes suits that depth; smaller tins will be done in fifteen to eighteen.
- YieldAbout a dozen, depending on the tin. They are best warm, the same day, split and buttered.
Cornstarch became a widely available household product in the nineteenth century, as American manufacturers refined it from maize and packaged it for domestic use; company cookbooks and newspaper columns of the period promoted it for puddings, blancmanges and cakes of exactly this kind. Recipes that replace much of the wheat flour with cornstarch were valued for the delicacy of the crumb, and the same logic survives today in the spoonful of cornstarch cooks add to flour to approximate cake flour. Pairing it with sour milk and bicarbonate of soda places this squarely in the older quick-bread tradition that preceded reliable commercial baking powder.