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White Cake (Two cupfuls sugar half cup)
Two cupfuls sugar, half cup of butter, one cupful of cold water, three cupfuls of flour, two teaspoonfuls baking powder, whites of four eggs.
This is a recipe in the older shorthand: the ingredients in order of use, with the method left to the cook's judgment. Reading it as a standard creamed butter cake gets you where the author intended.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter with the sugar, add the water alternately with the flour sifted with the baking powder, then fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites last. Folding the whites in at the end is the hinge of the recipe; beaten into the batter, they collapse and the cake bakes dense.
- OvenNo oven instruction is given. A modern cook can bake this at 350F: 30 to 35 minutes in two 8-inch layers, 45 to 55 minutes in a loaf or tube pan; it is done when the center springs back and a tester comes out clean.
- Butter is scant by modern tasteHalf a cup of butter to two cups of sugar and three cups of flour makes a lean, plain cake with a fine tight crumb rather than a rich one. A cup of butter with the water cut to three-quarters of a cup gives something closer to what a modern reader expects from "white cake."
- FlourHousehold flour of this period was often softer than today's all-purpose, though it varied by region and brand. Cake flour, spooned into the cup and leveled, gives a tender crumb; to approximate it with all-purpose, remove about 2 tablespoons from each cup.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons for three cups of flour is a light hand by current practice, and older single-acting powders lost strength on the shelf. Use fresh double-acting powder and consider 2 1/2 teaspoons if the cake bakes flat.
- CupfulsThe cup here is 8 fluid ounces, close enough to the modern measuring cup that no conversion is needed. Butter at half a cup is one stick, 4 ounces.
- No flavoring is listedA teaspoon of vanilla or half a teaspoon of almond extract beaten into the creamed butter is in keeping and much improves it.
- YieldEnough batter for two 8-inch layers or one 9-inch tube pan, serving 10 to 12. Four yolks are left over, which may be why recipes for gold cake, custard and boiled dressing often appear nearby in books of this kind.
White cake belongs to the era when chemical leavening and cheap refined sugar made a pale, fine-grained cake possible in an ordinary kitchen, and whiteness itself was the point: finely refined flour, white sugar and egg whites alone produced a crumb that looked expensive next to the dark, molasses-sweetened cakes of earlier generations. The reliance on whites also explains why such recipes cluster with yolk-heavy ones in books of this kind, the leftovers of one cake supplying the other. The shorthand form here, an ingredient list with no directions at all, was normal in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American compilations; the creaming, folding and baking were assumed knowledge, and the printed page served mainly as a reminder of proportions.