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French Cream Cake
Take three eggs, one cupful of sugar, one and a half cupfuls of flour, one teaspoonful of baking powder, and two tablespoonfuls of cold water. This is enough for two pans. Split the cakes while warm and spread the custard while hot between them.
To make the custard, boil nearly one pint of sweet milk. Take two tablespoonfuls of corn starch. Beat up with a little milk to this. Add two well-beaten eggs. When the milk has boiled up stir this in slowly with nearly a teacupful of sugar. When almost done add half a cupful of butter and fiavor to taste.
A plain hot-water sponge sandwiched with a cornstarch pastry cream — essentially the cake sold in the same era as Boston cream pie. The filling is where the recipe can go wrong.
- The hinge: cook the starch outThe cornstarch slurry must come back to a full boil for a minute or two after it goes into the milk, stirring constantly, or the custard will taste raw and thin as it cools. "When almost done" means when it has thickened enough to coat the spoon heavily.
- Temper the eggsBeating the eggs into the cold cornstarch-and-milk paste, as written, gives you some protection, but the mixture still hits boiling milk. Add a ladle of the hot milk to the egg mixture first, then return everything to the pan off the direct heat.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake the layers at 350F for 20 to 25 minutes in two greased 8- or 9-inch round pans, until the top springs back.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour or buttermilk that leavened many cakes of the period. Nothing is added to it.
- A teacupfulUsually reckoned at about three-quarters of a modern cup, roughly 6 fluid ounces, though period equivalences vary and some sources put a teacup as low as a gill. Older teacups ran smaller than the standard 8-ounce measure, so err on the low side for the sugar in the custard.
- Half a cupful of butterThat is a great deal of butter for a pint of custard and will make the filling very rich and prone to splitting. Two to four tablespoons, whisked in off the heat once the custard has thickened, gives a cleaner set.
- Splitting while warmWarm sponge tears. Two 8-inch layers need no splitting at all — sandwich them as they are. If you want four thin layers, let the cakes cool to lukewarm and use a long serrated knife.
- Flavor to tasteA teaspoon of vanilla is the period-appropriate choice; lemon extract was also usual in cream cakes, and rosewater appears in earlier nineteenth-century cake recipes.
- Yield and keepingOne two-layer cake, eight servings. Because the filling is an egg custard, the assembled cake should be refrigerated and eaten within two days.
Cakes filled with cornstarch-thickened custard appear all through late nineteenth-century American cookbooks under a shifting set of names — cream cake, cream pie, custard cake, and French cream cake — with little consistency between them. The "French" tag appears to have signaled the pastry-cream filling rather than any French origin, though the usage is not documented; cornstarch, widely available once commercial starch manufacture expanded around the middle of the century, served as the American stand-in for crème pâtissière. Similar batters baked in pie tins are often linked with Boston cream pie, whose name is usually explained by the pie plate it was baked in. That the cake itself is a fatless sponge raised with baking powder places it in the era after chemical leavening had become a pantry staple.