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Bride's Cake
1/2 cup Cottolene. 2 cups fine granulated sugar. 1/2 cup milk. 2½ cups pastry flour. 3 teaspoons baking powder. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1 teaspoon orange extract.
Whites of 8 eggs.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene, add sugar gradually, beating constantly. Mix and sift flour with baking powder and salt; add alternately to first mixture with milk, continue beating. Add extract, and cut and fold in the whites of eggs beaten until stiff and dry. Fill a tube cake pan well-greased with Cottolene, two-thirds full, and bake fifty minutes in a moderate oven. When slightly cool, spread with Ornamental Frosting.
A white butter-type cake leavened with baking powder and eight egg whites, baked in a tube pan and finished with royal icing. The method is standard creaming, but two of the ingredients need translation.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening, heavily promoted in cookbooks of this era (this book was published by its maker). Vegetable shortening is the direct equivalent; unsalted butter gives better flavour but a slightly denser crumb.
- The fat quantity is not statedThe ingredient list as printed begins at the sugar, so the amount of Cottolene is missing. Judging by other white cakes built on 2 cups sugar, 2 1/2 cups flour and 8 whites, something in the region of 2/3 cup of solid fat is a reasonable guess, but it is a guess and not the book's figure.
- Read the flour as 2 1/2 cupsPastry flour is soft and low in protein; if you only have all-purpose, replace 5 tablespoons of it with cornstarch to approximate it, or accept a firmer cake.
- Moderate ovenRead as roughly 350-375F. Fifty minutes suits a 9- or 10-inch tube pan filled two-thirds; start testing at 40 minutes.
- Egg whites "stiff and dry"Period phrasing for whipping until the mass no longer slumps. In practice stop at firm, glossy peaks — genuinely dry, grainy whites break into lumps that will not fold in cleanly.
- Cut and foldThis is the hinge of the recipe. The whites are the only lift beyond the baking powder, so add them in two or three additions and fold with a flat motion down through the batter, not a stir.
- Ornamental FrostingA separate recipe in the same book: a stiff royal icing of egg white and confectioners' sugar, spread while the cake is still faintly warm so it sets smooth. It dries hard, which is why it held up as wedding cake decoration.
- YieldOne tube cake, 12 to 16 slices. It keeps two or three days well wrapped; the icing seals the surface.
Bride's cake in American usage meant the white tier -- white flour, white sugar, egg whites only, white icing -- set against the dark fruited groom's cake, and the whiteness was the whole point at a period when a pure white crumb signalled highly refined ingredients and careful work. 52 Sunday Dinners was published as advertising for Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company and heavily promoted from the 1890s as a cheaper substitute for lard and butter, which is why the branded fat is named in the ingredient list rather than simply called shortening.