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Corn-Starch Cake
Two coffee-cups pulverized sugar, three-fourths cup butter, cup corn starch dissolved in a cup of sweet milk, two cups flour, whites of seven eggs, two tea-spoons cream tartar, tea-spoon soda mixed thoroughly with the flour; cream butter and sugar, add starch and milk, then add the whites and flour gradually until all is used. Flavor with lemon or rose. - Mrs. W. P. Anderson.
A white cake of the silver-cake family, leavened partly with beaten whites and partly with a homemade baking powder mixed into the flour. The original assumes you know how cake was assembled in the 1880s, so a few things need spelling out.
- The hinge: beat and fold the whitesThe recipe does not say to beat the whites, but a cake of this type leans on them for part of its lift. Beat them to soft-firm peaks and fold them in alternately with the flour, working gently. "Add gradually" here means folding, not stirring; beaten into the batter they collapse and the cake bakes dense.
- Coffee-cupsIn period usage a coffee-cup is generally reckoned at close to a standard 8-oz cup, sometimes a shade under; the book gives no definition. Two cups sugar, three-quarters cup butter, one cup cornstarch, one cup milk, two cups flour is a reasonable reading.
- Pulverized sugarThis means finely ground granulated sugar, the equivalent of today's superfine or caster sugar. It is not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and anti-caking agents and will throw the batter off.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTwo teaspoons cream of tartar plus one teaspoon soda is a period single-acting baking powder, in the region of four teaspoons of modern baking powder. Sift it thoroughly through the flour as directed and bake promptly, since it does its work as soon as it meets the wet batter.
- Sweet milkPlain unsoured whole milk. The distinction mattered when soured milk and clabber were commonly on hand and would have reacted with the soda.
- OvenNo oven direction of any kind is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits this batter.
- Pan and timingEnough for a 9- or 10-inch tube pan, about 45 to 55 minutes, or two 9-inch layers at 30 to 35 minutes. Bake until a skewer comes out clean; the crumb should stay pale.
- Rose flavoring"Rose" means rose water, about a teaspoon. Add it to the milk and taste as you go rather than pouring freely.
- ServingTwelve to sixteen slices. Traditionally finished with a boiled white icing, and paired with a gold cake made from the seven leftover yolks.
Cakes built on cornstarch appear all through late-nineteenth-century American cookbooks because cornstarch itself was then a fairly new commercial product: refining it from maize on an industrial scale is generally traced to Thomas Kingsford's works at Oswego, New York, in the 1840s, and by the 1880s boxed starch was cheap and widely available. Cooks quickly found that replacing part of the wheat flour with it cut the gluten and gave an unusually fine, tender, snow-white crumb, which suited the fashion for pale "silver" cakes served with white icing. The seven whites also explain the era's pairing of silver and gold cakes, so that no yolks were wasted. Like many recipes in The Dixie Cook-Book, it arrives credited to a contributor, Mrs. W. P. Anderson, and with the oven left entirely to the baker's judgment, since a wood range gave no numbers to quote.