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Delicate Cake
Two cupfuls of sugar, one cupful of butter, three cupfuls of flour, one-half cupful of milk, whites of seven eggs, one teaspoonful of baking powder.
This is a white butter cake given as a bare ingredient list, in the shorthand a 1900 cook expected to read. The method is assumed, and the assumptions are worth spelling out.
- The hinge: whites folded, not stirredCream butter and sugar, add flour alternately with the milk, then fold in the whites beaten to soft peaks last. The single teaspoon of baking powder is not enough leavening on its own; the air in the whites is doing most of the work, and stirring it out gives a dense, rubbery crumb.
- CupfulsAssume a standard 8 oz cup: 14 oz sugar, 8 oz butter (two sticks), about 13 oz flour, 4 fl oz milk. The flour of the period was softer than modern all-purpose; a cup of cake flour swapped for one of the three improves the texture.
- ButterUse unsalted at cool room temperature, and add a scant half teaspoon of salt; butter was often sold salted in this period, which may be why the original lists none.
- Baking powderOne teaspoon reads low today. Period powders were typically single-acting and their strength varied by brand, but two teaspoons is closer to modern practice if the whites are not beating up well for you.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven instruction at all. Bake at about 350F.
- Pan and timeEnough batter for two deep 9-inch round layers or three shallow ones (25-30 minutes), or a tube pan (about 50 minutes). Test with a skewer; a white cake browns very little on top, so colour is not a guide.
- FlavouringNone is given. A teaspoon of vanilla, or the almond extract common in white cakes of the era, belongs with the milk.
- The seven yolksThey keep two days covered in the refrigerator. Period cookbooks paired this cake with a "gold cake" or a boiled custard so nothing was wasted.
"Delicate cake" was a name used in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, often for a butter cake made with whites alone, the pallor being the point: a cake without yolks bakes almost white, and whiteness signalled refined flour, cash for seven eggs, and a cook with time to beat them. The type is generally associated with two nineteenth-century developments arriving together, commercial chemical leavening and cheap fine-milled white flour, and such recipes were sometimes printed alongside a companion cake using the leftover yolks. The same impulse toward whiteness produced angel food cake, which dispensed with butter altogether and became the more famous survivor of the pair.