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White Perfection Cake
Three cups sugar, one of butter, one of milk, three of flour, one of corn starch, whites of twelve eggs beaten to a stiff froth, two tea-spoons cream tartar in the flour, and one of soda in half the milk; dissolve the corn starch in the rest of the milk, and add it to the sugar and butter well beaten together, then the milk and soda, and the flour and whites of eggs. This cake is rightly named "Perfection." - Mrs. C. Jones, Bradford, Vt.
A large white butter cake of the cornstarch-and-egg-white school, contributed by a Vermont reader and printed among the layer-cakes. The proportions are sound; what needs translating is the leavening, the scale, and the missing oven instructions.
- Leavening is homemade baking powderTwo teaspoons cream of tartar sifted into the flour plus one teaspoon soda dissolved in milk is the period's way of making baking powder in the bowl. If you substitute, use about four teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder and plain sweet milk, and do not add both.
- Work quickly once the soda is inCream of tartar and soda react as soon as they meet in the wet batter, and single-acting leavening gives you one rise. Have the pans greased and the oven at temperature before the milk goes in, and get the cake into the heat immediately.
- Twelve egg whitesThat is roughly 1 1/2 cups, or about 12-13 oz. Beat to a stiff but not dry froth and fold in alternately with the flour, as the sequence implies; overbeaten whites break down and the cake bakes squat. The dozen leftover yolks would commonly have gone to a gold cake or a custard, though this recipe says nothing about them.
- CornstarchOne cup of cornstarch to three of flour lowers the protein and gives the fine, tender, pale crumb these cakes were prized for. It is the same principle as modern cake flour. Dissolving it in cold milk first, as directed, prevents lumps.
- Cup measuresNineteenth-century cups were roughly today's 8 fl oz, though how flour was filled varied from book to book. Weigh if you can: about 13 oz flour, 4 oz cornstarch, 21 oz sugar, 8 oz butter, 8 fl oz milk.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given, and the recipe names no oven heat at all. About 350F suits layers of this size in roughly 25-30 minutes; baked as one deep cake, drop to 325F and expect an hour or more.
- Yield and pansThis is a very large batter, something over four pounds. It fills four 9-inch layer pans or three 10-inch, or a large tube pan. Halving it works cleanly.
- FlavoringNone is specified. A teaspoon of vanilla, almond extract, or lemon works with the plain white crumb, and cakes of this kind were commonly finished with a boiled white icing or a jelly filling between layers.
White cakes built on egg whites and cornstarch spread through American cookbooks in the later nineteenth century, once boxed cornstarch had become a pantry staple and cooks found it would soften wheat flour toward a finer crumb. They belong to a family of paired recipes -- silver cake for the whites, gold cake for the yolks -- that let a household use up a dozen eggs without waste. The Dixie Cook Book, like other big compiled household volumes of the period, filled its cake chapters with signed contributions from readers, a name and a town standing as some assurance that a recipe had been tried in somebody's kitchen. Mrs. Jones's closing line, endorsing her own cake, is the kind of small boast these collections preserved verbatim.