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Tilden Cake
One cup butter, two of pulverized sugar, one of sweet milk, three of flour, half cup corn-starch, four eggs, two tea-spoons bakingpowder, two of lemon extract. This is so excellent that a "barrel" would not be too much of it. - Mrs. J. L. Peters, Memphis, Tenn.
A plain butter cake of the 1880s, lightened with cornstarch — a common trick before soft cake flour was sold. The proportions are sound; the original simply assumes you know the method.
- Pulverized sugarThis is finely ground granulated sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Use ordinary granulated, or superfine if you want it to cream faster.
- Sweet milkPlain whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour or buttermilk that older recipes leaned on for leavening. Since baking powder is doing the work here, sweet milk is correct.
- The cornstarchHalf a cup of cornstarch replacing part of the flour softens the crumb by diluting the gluten. Measure the three cups of flour and the half cup of cornstarch separately, then sift them together with the baking powder.
- Method, which is missingCream the butter and sugar until pale, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the dry ingredients alternately with the milk in three additions, beginning and ending with dry. Overmixing after the flour goes in gives a tough, tunnelled cake.
- Lemon extractTwo teaspoons can be assertive with a modern commercial extract. Start with one teaspoon, or use the zest of a lemon plus a teaspoon of extract.
- Pan and ovenThis is a large batter: three 9-inch round layers, or a large tube pan. The recipe gives no oven direction; 350F is a reasonable modern setting, with layers taking 25 to 30 minutes and a tube pan 50 to 60.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons for three and a half cups of dry ingredients is on the low side by current practice. Modern double-acting powder is more reliable than the single-acting powders of the period, so the cake will still rise, but do not cut the amount further.
- YieldAbout twelve to sixteen servings. Despite Mrs. Peters, a barrel is optimistic.
The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to the great wave of subscription and community cookbooks that followed the Civil War, in which recipes arrived credited to named contributors — here Mrs. J. L. Peters of Memphis — and often carried a line of praise along with them. Cakes named for politicians were a standing habit of the period, and Tilden Cake is generally taken to honor Samuel J. Tilden, the Democratic candidate who won the popular vote in the disputed presidential election of 1876; naming a cake after him in a Southern collection was not an accident of taste. The recipe itself is a straightforward cup cake of the era, distinguished only by the cornstarch, which cooks used to approximate the fine soft-wheat cake flours that were not yet reliably available in packages.