Fig Cake
One cup sugar, nearly one-half cup butter, one-half cup corn starch, one cup flour, heaped, whites of three eggs, one and onehalf teaspoons baking powder, flavor with lemon.
A whites-only butter cake of the sort sold as "silver cake," written in the shorthand of a book that assumed the reader had baked a hundred of them. Two things are missing from the printed text and you have to supply them.
- There are no figs in the ingredient listThe name comes from the filling, not the batter: this is a layer cake to be split or baked in two or three pans and spread with stewed figs. Figure about 8 oz dried figs simmered with a little water, sugar and lemon until thick and spreadable, cooled before it goes near the cake.
- No liquid is givenA cup of sugar, a cup of flour and half a cup of cornstarch will not come together on three egg whites alone. Comparable receipts of the period call for about half a cup of milk or water; that quantity is a reasonable reading, but the original is genuinely incomplete here rather than merely terse.
- "One cup flour, heaped"A heaped cup of the period's soft flour runs to something over a level cup, perhaps 4 1/2 to 5 oz. Spooning flour into the cup and levelling it, then adding a scant extra tablespoon or two, gets you close; scooping and packing does not.
- Cornstarch is doing real workReplacing a third of the flour with starch lowers the protein and gives the fine, tender, pale crumb these white cakes were prized for. Do not substitute more flour for it, and sift the starch and flour together at least twice so it disperses.
- Method the recipe omitsCream the butter and sugar, add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the liquid, then fold in the whites beaten to soft peaks last. Beating the whites into the batter rather than folding them costs you the lift, since the whites plus baking powder are the only leavening.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction whatsoever; you have to supply one. A moderate oven of about 350F suits this batter. Two 8-inch layers take 20 to 25 minutes; a single loaf or square pan wants 35 to 40. The cake browns very little, so judge by a clean tester and the sides pulling from the pan.
- Flavouring"Flavor with lemon" most likely means lemon extract, about a teaspoon. Grated zest works and tastes better, but adds specks to a cake whose whole point was whiteness.
- YieldA small cake: two thin 8-inch layers or one modest single layer, eight to ten slices. Leftover egg yolks go into a custard or a gold cake, and period books often print such white and yellow cakes near one another.
Cakes raised on egg whites alone were a mark of a well-supplied late-Victorian kitchen: they wasted three yolks, demanded a good deal of arm work, and showed off the whiteness of refined flour and sugar. Boxed corn starch was cheap and widely advertised through much of the second half of the century, and cookbooks began recommending it as a way to soften an all-purpose flour into something closer to a cake flour. A "fig cake" of this era is often a plain white layer cake filled with stewed dried figs or fruits a northern household could get, sweet and reliable, all year — though versions with chopped fruit worked into the batter exist too.
Dark Part
One-half cup sugar, one full cup flour, scant one-fourth cup of butter, one-fourth cup cold water, one-fourth teaspoon soda dissolved in a teaspoon of hot water, three-fourths cup chopped raisins, one teaspoon cinnamon, one nutmeg, one egg or yolks of two, from one-fourth to one-half pounds of figs, cut very fine; bake in jelly tins and put together alternately.