Victorian recipes don't always give tons of information

February 13, 2018 3:36 PM

I'm looking at a cake recipe from 1896, and it says to add the yolks before you add the whites. There's no indication that the whites are to be beaten. What is happening here?

I'm looking at the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, which in later editions was called the Fannie Farmer Cookbook. I'll just copy the recipe here. It's in two columns in the original, but I can't do that here, so I've just labeled both columns in case there's some clue in the formatting.

Spanish Cake

[column 1]
1/2 cup butter.
1 cup sugar.
Yolks 2 eggs
1/2 cup milk.

[column 2]
1 3/4 cups flour.
3 teaspoons baking powder.
1 teaspoon cinnamon.
Whites 2 eggs.

Mix ingredients in order given. Bake in shallow tins and spread between and on top Caramel Frosting.

So why are the yolks and whites added at different stages? The cake is leavened with baking powder, so is there any reason to think the egg whites are supposed to be beaten stiff? Lots of other recipes in the book also separate yolks and eggs, and none of them give any more information than this one. A few recipes do say things like "beat egg whites until stiff and dry," so presumably that means it's not part of the process with this one. Or is it? What would be so obvious to me, the Victorian cook, that it wasn't even worth mentioning?

posted by shapes that haunt the dusk to Food & Drink (15 answers total)

She clarifies in another part of the cookbook about how to mix butter cakes:

"To Mix Butter Cakes. An earthen bowl should always be used for mixing cake, and a wooden cake-spoon with slits lightens the labor. Measure dry ingredients, and mix and sift baking powder and spices, if used, with flour. Count out number of eggs required, breaking each separately that there may be no loss should a stale egg chance to be found in the number, separating yolks from whites if rule so specifies. Measure butter, then liquid. Having everything in readiness, the mixing may be quickly accomplished. If butter is very hard, by allowing it to stand a short time in a warm room it is measured and creamed much easier. If time cannot be allowed for this to be done, warm bowl by pouring in some hot water, letting stand one minute, then emptying and wiping dry. Avoid overheating bowl, as butter will become oily rather than creamy. Put butter in bowl, and cream by working with a wooden spoon until soft and of a creamy consistency; then add sugar gradually, and continue beating. Add yolks of eggs or whole eggs beaten until light, liquid, and flour mixed and sifted with baking powder; or liquid and flour may be added alternately. When yolks and whites of eggs are beaten separately, whites are usually added at the last, as is the case when whites of eggs alone are used. A cake can be made fine-grained only by long beating, although light and delicate with a small amount of beating. Never stir cake after the final beating, remembering that beating motion should always be the last used. Fruit, when added to cake, is usually floured to prevent its settling to the bottom. This is not necessary if it is added directly after the sugar, which is desirable in all dark cakes. If a light fruit cake is made, fruit added in this way discolors the loaf. Citron is first cut in thin slices, then in strips, floured, and put in between layers of cake mixtures. Raisins are seeded and cut, rather than chopped. To seed raisins, wet tips of fingers in a cup of warm water. Then break skins with fingers or cut with a vegetable knife; remove seeds, and put in cup of water. This is better than covering raisins with warm water; if this be done, water clings to fruit, and when dredged with flour a pasty mass is formed on the outside. Washed currants, put up in packages, are quite free from stems and foreign substances, and need only picking over and rolling in flour. Currants bought in bulk need thorough cleaning. First roll in flour, which helps to start dirt; wash in cold water, drain, and spread to dry; then roll again in flour before using."
posted by Foam Pants at 3:44 PM on February 13, 2018

Oh dang! I don't know how I missed that. It's right at the start of the chapter. When I went to check in my book, it opened to that exact page. Don't I feel dumb.

Can I still ask why the yolks and whites are added separately? I don't cook a lot of cakes, but I feel like I've only seen yolks and whites separated when the whites were beaten stiff for a sponge. Do you still get more rise if you add lightly beaten whites at the end?
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 4:10 PM on February 13, 2018

Adding beaten egg-foam, whether gooey or soft-peaks or stiff, will lighten the texture and potentially add lift. However, and I can't tell from reading the recipe, if there's too much lift, it can crack the appearance of a cake. That said, frosting hides a lot of cosmetic flaws.

When whites are beaten to any amount of stiffness, there absolutely can't be any oil or fat present, or it'll impede the foam. Angel Food and Meringue are fat-free for that reason. So with a recipe like this, where there's fat in the mixture (butter/yolks), the best you'll get is lighter texture from folding the beaten eggs, and with them the air the contain, into the mixture. It does great things for waffles, but does it do good things for spanish cake?

I don't know, but the version with air in it will taste much the same as the version without, as long as the cake isn't entirely collapsed into cakey-fudge, which I doubt would happen. Seems like it'd be a cheap and delicious experiment to make it both ways.
posted by Sunburnt at 4:21 PM on February 13, 2018

I’ve made a bazillion pound cakes, and never separated the whites from the yolks. But, keep in mind, they didn’t have electric mixers back then, so if the goal was to get a fine-grained butter cake that retained something of a light texture, that would (to my mind) accomplish that more easily if one were using a hand mixer or, in the case of this recipe, a slotted spoon.

My pound cake recipe calls for beating the butter and sugar for 5 minutes, then a minute each for each egg, then another minute for vanilla, and then stirring the dry ingredients (flour, salt) only until completely integrated. That adds a lot of air and therefore the cake rises nicely and has a fine grain despite the lack of leavening. But if you’re phoning in from 1896 and your mixer is powered by elbow grease, then yeah, I could totally see using a tip like separating the eggs and whipping the whites to get an edge without killing your arm.
posted by Autumnheart at 4:43 PM on February 13, 2018

Also, that book has a pretty awesome tip about how to warm butter without melting it. I always have that problem because I nuke the butter a little to speed the softening, but then a little ends up melted. This isn’t really a problem for pound cakes but does make my cookies flat. It’s cool to read what people used to do to speed things up without the technology we enjoy.
posted by Autumnheart at 4:46 PM on February 13, 2018

The yolks are fat and you are mixing up the fats and sugar. The drys get mixed so the leavening is evenly distributed. The whites are watery and that is wettingnthe drys to activate the leavening. The fats go in last. But when you want flaky pastry, the fats go into the dry ingredients to coat them so the liquid ingredients don't get a much of a chance to bring out the gluten and toughen the pastry. Some cakes are lightened by adding whipped egg whites.
posted by Oyéah at 4:49 PM on February 13, 2018

Egg yolks are not just fat; they are emulsifiers, which means they let you create a mixture of water (or other watery stuff) and fats. For instance, mayonnaise is a classic emulsion of vinegar and oil.

In this case I think they want you to add the egg yolks early because you're creating a butter/sugar/milk emulsion. I would actually have expected them to tell you to cream the butter and sugar, then mix in the yolks, then slowly add the milk plus the egg whites, but I've never tried this recipe myself. That is how I make very nice sugar cookies though.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:24 PM on February 13, 2018

In those instructions, she concedes that you can add the eggs whole and not separate them. Remember that beating a cake by hand is a really hard job, I can only assume she is trying to give you the option of beating the egg white frothy by hand by itself to make it easier on you. However, we have electricity on our side. I would use any modern cookbook's mixing method for a butter cake.
posted by Foam Pants at 10:17 PM on February 13, 2018

Air in cake batter makes the finished cake lighter without extra leavening which can affect the taste. And yes, adding yolks and whites separately leaves more air in the batter, even slightly beating the egg whites adds more, beating them stiff adds the most. Sponge cakes are the epitome of a light cake, but they also take the most work. Adding whole eggs and beating between each one also works, but the cake will be denser, more like a pound cake. (FWIW, I've never used a mixer to beat egg whites - I have my gramma's egg beater, which she probably used to make this cake.)
posted by jlkr at 6:13 AM on February 14, 2018

Autumnheart -- can you share the tip about how to warm butter?
posted by jabes at 8:38 AM on February 14, 2018

It's in the quotation above:

If butter is very hard, by allowing it to stand a short time in a warm room it is measured and creamed much easier. If time cannot be allowed for this to be done, warm bowl by pouring in some hot water, letting stand one minute, then emptying and wiping dry. Avoid overheating bowl, as butter will become oily rather than creamy.

Another tip is to cut the butter into smaller pieces which will give more surface area to be warmed faster. Some folks go so far as to grate the butter which makes very small pieces indeed.
posted by CathyG at 10:22 AM on February 14, 2018

Thanks for the explanations! We don't actually own an electric mixer, so whenever we do bake stuff, we have to do it all by hand. It is indeed a lot of work for some things. If this is a labor-saving shortcut, that's just fine with me! We're able to make decent cakes as it is, but I'll experiment and see if this technique makes the whole process any easier.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:38 PM on February 14, 2018

One good tip for softening butter is, instead of warming the whole bowl with hot water, warm a glass or mug using hot water (sink-temp is fine), pour it out, and then invert the glass/mug over the stick of butter. The glass acts as a very mild oven.
posted by Sunburnt at 10:13 PM on February 14, 2018

(Adding to the butter-warming-without-melting derail: cutting up frozen butter into teeny-tiny chunks will also speed thawing/warming.)
posted by mon-ma-tron at 9:40 AM on February 15, 2018

Update: I made the cake last night! I followed the recipe exactly, including adding the beaten egg whites last. It's a little weird - because you're not mixing the dry ingredients first, you have to stir the baking powder and cinnamon into a pretty stiff batter, and then it slackens and becomes easier to beat after you add the egg whites. It's still a pretty stiff batter.

It baked just fine, though. Not dense at all. I used two 9 inch cake pans, and I think the recipe is better suited for something a little smaller, so there's a little more height to them.

The big problem was actually the frosting. She calls it a caramel frosting, but it's not caramel at all. It's basically a chocolate fudge. It was pretty decent fudge, but it set up almost as soon as it was on the cake, so it was difficult to spread. I think I'll probably scrape it off this evening and do it again.

All in all, though, a pretty tasty cake, and it turned out just fine doing it all by hand.

Also, I tried the butter softening technique. I actually had to let the bowl cool off for a while before I could use it, and then of course it was a little too cool. The butter still melted a little, but it didn't turn greasy.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 1:15 PM on February 15, 2018