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White Cake (II)
Mrs. Rogers.
Two cups sugar, one cup water cold, whites of eleven eggs, three teaspoons of baking powder, one and one-half cups flour, two-thirds cup butter; stir butter and sugar up together till it is light; put whites into sugar and butter, flour and powder in last.
A contributor's white cake from the era when baking powder was still a novelty worth using three teaspoons of. The method is compressed to the point of omission, and the flour figure deserves scrutiny before you start.
- The flour looks shortTwo cups sugar, a cup of water and eleven whites against one and a half cups of flour is far outside modern proportion; most white cakes run close to equal volumes of flour and sugar, often more flour. This may be a typesetting slip or a different cup, but as printed the batter will be very thin and prone to collapse. Treat the number as unreliable and test a small batch before committing eleven eggs.
- Where the water goesThe instructions never say. Standard practice for a butter cake of this type is to add the water alternately with the flour, beginning and ending with flour, so the batter does not break.
- The whites are not whippedThe whites may go in unbeaten -- "Put whites into sugar and butter" gives no direction to beat them, so as printed they are stirred in liquid rather than folded in as a meringue, which would leave the lift to the baking powder. Period recipes did sometimes assume beating without saying so. If you beat them to soft peaks instead, fold them in at the very end and reduce the powder.
- Three teaspoons is a lotNineteenth-century baking powders varied in strength and were not double-acting as most modern powders are. Three teaspoons in a cake this size can leave a taste of the powder and may cause the cake to rise and fall; two is nearer the modern mark for the flour quantity given.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the writer had none to give. A cake like this wants a moderate oven, 350F, for roughly 30-35 minutes in two 8-inch layers or 45-55 minutes in a tube pan.
- Butter and sugar"Stir up together till it is light" is creaming, and in a kitchen of this date it would have been done by hand over several minutes. A stand mixer gets there in three to four minutes on medium with butter at cool room temperature.
- Eleven yolksThe recipe leaves you with them. Covered in the refrigerator they keep a couple of days, and go into custard, curd, mayonnaise or a gold cake.
- YieldAs written this is a large cake: two or three 8-inch layers, or one tube pan, serving twelve to sixteen.
White cake belongs to the second half of the nineteenth century, when chemical leavening and cheap refined sugar made it possible for an ordinary household to produce a cake that was pale all the way through rather than the yellow of a yolk-rich pound cake. Whiteness was the point: it signalled white flour, white sugar and the extravagance of discarding eleven yolks. The Home Cook Book was a Chicago charity compilation of contributed receipts, which is why this one carries a name at the top and almost no method underneath. Mrs. Rogers was presumably writing for women who already knew what creaming meant and how their own stove behaved; the gaps in the instructions are probably not carelessness so much as an assumption of shared competence.