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California Cake
Yolks of five eggs, one-half cup butter, one cup sugar, one-half cup milk, one and one-half cups flour, one and one-half teaspoons baking powder. Bake in two jelly cake tins. CHOCOLATE ICING TO PUT BETWEEN AND ON THE CAKE.
One cup chocolate, one cup sugar, one wine glass milk or water, one tablespoon corn starch; put on the range and boil pretty thick; flavor cake and frosting with vanilla.
A yolk-rich butter cake in two thin layers, filled and topped with a cooked cornstarch chocolate icing. The original assumes you know the creaming method and the state of your own stove, so the gaps are worth filling before you start.
- Method, unstatedCream the butter and sugar, beat in the yolks, then add the flour sifted with the baking powder alternately with the milk. The recipe gives only a bare list of ingredients and expects you to fill in the rest.
- Jelly cake tinsThese are shallow round layer pans, 8 or 9 inches across with sides about an inch high. Two modern 8-inch cake pans work; the batter is small, so the layers will be thin, which is the intent.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because ranges had none. Bake at 350F for 18 to 25 minutes for thin layers, until the centre springs back.
- One cup chocolateGenuinely ambiguous. In this period it means grated or chopped unsweetened block chocolate, probably 4 to 6 ounces by weight depending on how coarsely it was grated. Start at 4 ounces with the cup of sugar and taste.
- A wine glassRoughly 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. Slacken the icing with a little more milk if it tightens past spreading consistency.
- Boiling the icingThe cornstarch is what sets this, and it has to reach a full boil for a minute or so to lose its raw starch taste and thicken properly. Spread it while still warm; it stiffens considerably as it cools and will tear the crumb if you wait.
- FlavouringAdd the vanilla to the icing off the heat, and about a teaspoon to the cake batter with the milk. The instruction to flavour both is easily missed at the end of the paragraph.
- Five whites left overKeep them for meringue, an angel food, or a boiled icing.
- YieldA two-layer cake serving eight to ten in small slices.
Cakes built on yolks alone paired naturally with the white cakes and angel foods that consumed whites by the dozen, and a thrifty kitchen may well have run the two together so nothing was thrown out; a similar batter turns up elsewhere as gold cake. Names like "California" were attached freely to cakes in American community and household cookbooks of the late nineteenth century, and may signal nothing more than novelty or the name of the woman who contributed it; no particular Californian origin need be read into it. If the recipe is placed under Supper, that is a reminder that in this period the evening meal was often the lighter one, a spread of breads, preserves and a plain layer cake rather than a cooked course. The cooked cornstarch icing is characteristic of the era too: cheaper than a butter icing and firm enough to hold two thin layers together.