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Corn Starch Cake (Two cups pulverized sugar)
Two cups pulverized sugar, two-thirds cup melted butter, one-half cup milk, two teaspoons Cook's Friend baking powder, one teaspoon vanilla, one paper corn starch, six eggs.
An ingredient list of the kind common in subscription cookbooks, where the method was assumed. It is a butter cake leavened by both baking powder and eggs, with cornstarch standing in for all of the flour, which gives a very fine, tender, almost velvety crumb.
- The hinge: separate the eggsSix eggs against this much sugar and no wheat flour means the whites are doing the structural work. Beat the yolks into the creamed butter and sugar, fold the stiffly beaten whites in last, and do not stir them down. Cornstarch has no gluten, so once the air is out nothing will bring it back.
- "One paper corn starch"Cornstarch was sold in small paper packets, and the size is not standardized in these books. Roughly a cup of cornstarch (about 4 to 4.5 oz) is the reading that balances this quantity of sugar, butter and eggs. Treat it as an estimate rather than a conversion.
- Pulverized sugarNineteenth-century pulverized sugar was granulated sugar ground fine, closer to today's caster or superfine sugar than to modern powdered sugar, which contains added cornstarch and anti-caking agents. Superfine granulated is the better substitute; it creams properly with butter.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA baking powder brand sold in Canada in this period. Any modern double-acting baking powder works, measure for measure; modern powders are generally reckoned stronger, so two level teaspoons is ample and more will leave a chemical edge.
- Oven and panNo temperature or oven description is given. As a modern equivalent, bake at about 350F in a greased 9-inch tube pan or two 8-inch layers. A tube pan needs about 45 to 55 minutes, layers about 25 to 30; the cake is done when it springs back and the sides pull from the pan.
- Melted butterTwo-thirds cup of melted butter cannot be creamed to hold air, so if you follow the wording literally the whites are the only leavening support beyond the powder. Softened butter creamed with the sugar produces a better rise; if you use it melted, let it cool so it does not cook the yolks.
- Yield and keepingAbout 10 to 12 servings. Cakes made with cornstarch in place of flour tend to dry out quickly and are best eaten fresh, plain or under a boiled white icing.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in the 1870s by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold for the benefit of the Hospital for Sick Children, which is why its pages read as a collection of neighbours' contributions rather than a single author's system. Cornstarch cake belongs to a wave of recipes that followed the arrival of cheap packaged cornstarch, generally traced to the Oswego, New York works of Thomas Kingsford in the 1840s; manufacturers pushed it hard for puddings and for pale, fine-grained cakes, and the resulting family of white or "silver" cakes used the whites of eggs while the yolks went into a companion gold cake. The reference to Cook's Friend baking powder is a period marker of its own: chemical leavening was still new enough that a cook named her brand the way she would name a make of stove.