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Delicate Cake
Mix one pound of caster-sugar with an equal amount of warm fresh butter, and add by degrees fourteen whites of eggs; mix a half pound of cornmeal and a like quantity of white flour together, and beat in with the rest, then put in a teacupful of milk, a teacupful of brandy, a little lemon juice, and flavor to taste, beating thoroughly. Put in a greased mould, and bake until done in a moderate oven.
A very large white cake in the nineteenth-century style: no chemical leavening, no yolks, and a pound each of butter and sugar. It works, but the original assumes a cook who knows what is left unsaid.
- The cornmeal is probably cornstarchThe cornmeal may be a slip for cornstarch -- A pound of butter and fourteen whites points to a fine white cake, and gritty yellow cornmeal sits oddly with that. Note that the recipe says "cornmeal," not the "corn flour" that in period usage often meant cornstarch, so this is an interpretation rather than a certainty; part flour, part starch turns up in a number of period white-cake receipts. If you want the delicate crumb the title promises, cornstarch is the safer reading.
- Moderate oven350F. With a mould this large, expect 60 to 80 minutes; test with a skewer at the deepest point rather than trusting the clock.
- Egg whites do all the liftingThere is no baking powder. The recipe says only to add the whites "by degrees" and to beat thoroughly, and gives no instruction to whip them separately; a modern baker will get a lighter result beating them to soft peaks and folding them in, since whites stirred in as plain liquid tend to give a dense, greasy cake.
- "Warm fresh butter"Softened to about 65F, not melted, and unsalted. Melted butter will not hold air when creamed with the sugar and the cake will sink.
- A teacupfulPeriod usage varies, roughly 4 to 6 fl oz, so somewhere between half and three-quarters of a cup each of milk and brandy. Even at the low end that is a great deal of alcohol; half the amount gives flavour without loosening the batter.
- Fourteen whitesAbout 1 3/4 cups, or 14 oz by weight. Save the yolks for custard or a gold cake, a pairing that turns up often in cookbooks of the period.
- Yield and pansThis is close to five pounds of batter. Divide it between two 10-inch tube pans or three 9-inch round layers rather than attempting one mould; a single deep cake this size will scorch at the edge before the centre sets.
- Caster sugarSuperfine sugar, sold under that name in the US. Granulated will do if you pulse it briefly, and it dissolves better into butter than the coarse crystals do.
Egg-white cakes were a fixture of American baking from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and they existed in a household economy of pairs: the whites commonly went into a white or "silver" cake, the fourteen orphaned yolks into a gold cake, a custard or a mayonnaise, though the two need not be made together. The extravagance is not the sugar or the butter but the eggs, and a recipe calling for fourteen whites at once announces a kitchen with no shortage of them. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, assembled his 1896 book from hotel practice and from the wider stock of American domestic receipts, which is why entries like this one sit alongside restaurant dishes and read in the compressed, assume-everything style of a home cookbook rather than a chef's formula. The brandy is characteristic of the period too, one of the spirits and citrus flavourings that gave a plain cake much of its character.