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Orange Cake
Use one cupful of butter, one of sweet milk, two of sugar, two teaspoonfuls of baking powder, five eggs, reserving the whites of three, to be beaten to a stiff froth to go between the cakes. The remainder of the five eggs must go in the batter. Three and a half cupfuls of flour; grate two oranges (picking out the seeds and large pieces) into the batter. Take two cupfuls of pulverized sugar, beat with the reserved whites as frosting; then put between cakes as you would jelly cake.
Drop Cakes. Take one pound of flour, half a pound of sugar, half a pound of butter and three eggs. Beat the butter and flour to a cream, beat the eggs separately, add the yolks and part of the flour, then the whites and the remainder of the flour. Stir in half a pound of currants, a quarter of a pound of citron, and a teaspoonful of mace or cinnamon. Drop with a spoon upon flat tins, and sift sugar over them.
Two recipes have been run together here: a layered orange jelly cake and a batch of rich currant drop cakes. Both assume a cook who already knows how a cake is mixed and baked, so almost all the practical detail has to be supplied.
- Pans and ovenThis is a "jelly cake" — thin layers baked separately and stacked with filling. The recipe gives no pan count and no baking direction; divided among three 8- or 9-inch round pans, the layers will take roughly 20 to 25 minutes at 350F.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk used in saleratus recipes. No substitution needed.
- Grate two orangesThe intent is the zest and the grated flesh, minus seeds and membrane. In practice, the finely grated zest of two oranges plus 2 to 3 tablespoons of juice gives the flavour without loosening the batter.
- Pulverized sugarConfectioners' or icing sugar, at this period sold ground rather than, as now, cut with cornstarch. Two cups beaten with three whites gives a soft, spreadable uncooked icing; sift it first, as period pulverized sugar was likely coarser than today's.
- The uncooked fillingThe frosting between the layers is raw egg white and never sees heat. If that matters in your household, pasteurized whites or meringue powder behave the same way here. Assembled cake keeps a day at most and should be refrigerated.
- LeaveningTwo teaspoons of baking powder for three and a half cups of flour is modest, but five eggs and thorough creaming carry much of the lift. Cream the butter and sugar properly and fold the beaten whole eggs in — the recipe never says so, and the cake depends on it.
- Drop Cakes: weightsA pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups, half a pound of sugar 1 cup, half a pound of butter 1 cup or two sticks. Half a pound of currants is a generous 1 1/2 cups; a quarter pound of citron about 3/4 cup, chopped fine.
- Drop Cakes: a likely misprint"Beat the butter and flour to a cream" should almost certainly read butter and sugar; flour beaten into butter will not cream. Bake the spoonfuls on lined sheets at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes, until just coloured at the edges.
- YieldThe cake serves 10 to 12. The drop cakes, made with a full pound of flour, run to five or six dozen small ones.
Layered cakes filled like this were called jelly cakes regardless of what went between them — the format came first, the filling second, and a cook who knew jelly cake knew orange cake without being told to bake the batter in three tins. Orange cake turns up repeatedly in American cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s, which is often said to be roughly when refrigerated rail cars and Florida and California groves put fresh oranges into ordinary kitchens outside the winter holiday season; earlier books lean on candied peel and orange-flower water instead. The Drop Cakes following it belong to an older tradition altogether: a pound-cake ratio, currants and citron, mace or cinnamon, dropped by the spoon rather than rolled and cut. Recipes of this kind are generally counted among the forerunners of what Americans came to call cookies, though the lineage is a contested one, and the tops are finished with sifted sugar in place of an icing.