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Delicate Cake
Three cups flour, two of sugar, three-fourths cup sweet milk, whites of six eggs, half cup butter, tea-spoon cream tartar, half tea-spoon of soda. Flavor with lemon. Good and easily made.- Miss Mary E. Miller.
A plain white cake of the creaming-method school, written in the shorthand a nineteenth-century cook could fill in herself. The proportions are sound; what is missing is method, pan, oven and time.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter and sugar, add the milk alternately with the flour sifted with the cream of tartar and soda, then fold in the whites beaten to soft peaks last. The beaten whites lighten the batter alongside the cream of tartar and soda, so fold rather than stir; knocking the air out gives a closer, heavier crumb.
- Cream of tartar and sodaA teaspoon of cream of tartar with half a teaspoon of soda is roughly equivalent to two teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder. The old pairing is single-acting, so it begins working the moment the batter is wet; get it into the pan and the oven without delay.
- Sweet milkPlain unsoured whole milk. The term distinguished it from the buttermilk and clabbered milk that were equally common in a Southern kitchen and would have called for more soda and no cream of tartar.
- Cup sizePeriod cups in American books of this era are generally close to the modern 8 fl oz measure, so reading the cups as standard is a reasonable approximation. The recipe does not say whether the flour was sifted before or after measuring; three cups will run somewhere between about 12 and 15 oz depending on method, so weigh if you want consistency.
- ButterHalf a cup is one stick, 4 oz. Butter of the period was often salted; if you are using salted butter no further salt is needed, and with unsalted add a scant half teaspoon.
- Flavor with lemonEither a teaspoon of lemon extract or the grated zest of one lemon creamed in with the butter and sugar. Zest gives a rounder flavor; extract gives the sharper, more perfumed note the original writer probably had in mind.
- Oven and panThe recipe names neither; a moderate oven of about 350F is a reasonable modern equivalent. The batter fills two 9-inch round layers (25-30 minutes) or a 9x13 pan (35-40 minutes); a tube pan will take 45-55 minutes. Test with a skewer at the center.
- The six yolksWhite cakes of this kind were baked alongside a gold cake, a custard or a boiled dressing so nothing was wasted. Keep the yolks covered and refrigerated and use them within a day or two.
- YieldAbout 12 to 16 servings. Unfrosted it is fairly plain; contemporary practice would have finished it with a boiled white icing or served slices with preserved fruit.
The Dixie Cook Book, like most of the big subscription compilations of the 1880s and 90s, was assembled from contributions signed by name, and Miss Mary E. Miller's recipe is typical of what those women submitted: a short line of proportions, no method, and a brief verdict at the end. The assumption is that any reader knows how to make a cake and only needs the numbers. Cakes leavened with whites alone, or with whites plus cream of tartar and soda, became popular through the second half of the nineteenth century as reliable chemical leavening and cheap refined white sugar and flour spread; a pale, fine-grained cake was a small display of ingredients that had once been costly. Cream of tartar with soda was the standard homemade equivalent of baking powder, and many cooks kept using the two separately long after commercial powders were on the shelf; what is documented is not their reasons but the controversy of the period over packaged powders being adulterated with alum.