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Country Cakes
Place in a basin three-quarters of a pound of flour, half a pound of partly-melted butter and the yolks of half a dozen eggs, beat well until a thick cream is obtained; then take the whites of the eggs and beat up with one pound of finely-sifted lumpsugar, and when it becomes frothy, mix all together. Place the paste in tins and bake in a brisk oven for twenty minutes.
A rich, sugar-heavy little cake built on the old separated-egg method: yolks worked into flour and butter, whites whipped with the sugar and folded through. The proportions are given by weight, which makes it easy to follow once the units are converted.
- Weights in cupsThree-quarters of a pound of flour is about 2 3/4 cups; half a pound of butter is 2 sticks; one pound of sugar is roughly 2 1/4 cups. Weighing is far more reliable here, since the batter's whole structure depends on the ratio.
- Lump sugar, finely siftedLump sugar was loaf or cube sugar crushed and sieved to a fine powder. Ordinary granulated or, better, caster sugar does the same job; do not substitute confectioners' sugar, which carries cornstarch.
- Partly-melted butterProbably butter warmed until soft and just beginning to melt rather than fully liquid; the recipe wants it beaten with the yolks to 'a thick cream', which is harder to achieve with butter that has gone to oil.
- The hinge: the whitesBeating a full pound of sugar into six whites is the recipe's only leavening; there is no chemical raising agent. The original asks only that they be beaten with the sugar until frothy before everything is mixed together.
- A brisk ovenRoughly 400 to 425F by the usual modern gloss. Twenty minutes at that heat suits small tins; a larger tin would need a slower oven and longer baking, tested with a skewer.
- TinsThe recipe specifies nothing beyond 'tins'; small buttered tins are the obvious reading given the twenty-minute bake. The paste is thick enough to be spooned rather than poured.
- YieldRoughly two dozen small cakes from this quantity of batter.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maitre d'hotel, put his name to a 1896 collection that ranged well beyond hotel cooking, gathering household and provincial recipes alongside the restaurant repertoire. "Country cakes" here is a plain small cake made without chemical leavening, raised entirely by beaten egg whites in the manner of older English and continental sponge and biscuit recipes. Baking powder was widely available by the 1890s, so a recipe like this one is a survival of an earlier technique rather than the standard method of its day.