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Virginia Silver Cake
Take three-fourths of a pound of butter, one pound of white sugar, three-fourths of a pound of flour, one-quarter of a pound of cornstarch, whites of eighteen eggs, one teaspoonful of cream tartar.
This is a formula rather than a method — the book assumes a cook who already knows how to build a butter cake with beaten whites. The proportions are sound; everything else has to be supplied.
- The weights in cupsThree-quarters of a pound of butter is 1 1/2 cups (3 sticks); a pound of white sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; three-quarters of a pound of flour is roughly 2 3/4 cups; a quarter pound of cornstarch is about 1 cup. Weighing is far more reliable here, since the flour-to-cornstarch ratio is what gives the cake its texture.
- Eighteen egg whitesLarge egg whites run about 1 oz each, so this is roughly 18 oz — a generous 2 cups. With no chemical raising agent in the formula, the whites and the air creamed into the butter and sugar do the lifting, so they must be beaten to firm, not dry, peaks and folded in last.
- Cream of tartar's jobA teaspoon in this quantity of whites is a stabiliser, not a raising agent. Beat it into the whites once they are foamy rather than sifting it with the flour, or you lose most of the benefit.
- The cornstarchSubstituting a quarter of the flour with cornstarch cuts the gluten and gives the fine, close, pale crumb the name promises. Sift it with the flour two or three times; lumped cornstarch shows up as white streaks in the baked cake.
- No flavouring is givenNineteenth-century silver cakes were often scented with almond extract, and sometimes with rose water, lemon or vanilla. A teaspoon of extract would be in keeping.
- Oven and panThis is a large batter — a 10-inch tube pan or two 9-inch layers. The recipe gives no oven direction; 325-350F for around an hour to an hour and a quarter in a tube pan, less for layers, suits a batter of this kind.
- YieldA full tube cake serving 16 to 20. It keeps well wrapped, and improves on the second day.
- The eighteen yolksThese need a use of their own. Gold cake, boiled custard and rich sauces all take yolks and were commonly made to match; plan the second dish before you start cracking.
Silver cake and its partner gold cake were a familiar pairing in American household cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, a practical answer to the problem of what to do with the half of the egg you did not use. Recipes of this type multiplied after cornstarch became a cheap grocery staple in the 1850s and 1860s, and manufacturers' pamphlets promoted it as a way to make cake "finer" and whiter than flour alone allowed. Regional labels like "Virginia" attached to such cakes are generally a claim to gentility rather than documented origin — they signal a rich, showy, egg-heavy cake of the kind associated with Southern hospitality. The eighteen whites are the real period marker: for households that kept their own flock, eggs need not be bought at all, and such a cook could be extravagant with them in a way that a modern baker, pricing out a dozen and a half eggs, cannot.