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Red Part (One cup red sugar and one-half)
One cup red sugar and one-half cup butter, two-thirds cup milk, two cups flour, one teaspoon baking powder, yolks of five eggs, one teaspoon vanilla, one-half pound english currants, for the seeds. In filling your cake pan first put the red part in, drop in the currants, then put on the outside which must be the white. Bake in a moderate oven, when done ornament it with a handsome frosting. It is a beautiful cake.
This is half of a two-part cake — the red interior of a Victorian "watermelon cake," with currants standing in for the seeds. The white batter it is meant to be wrapped in appears elsewhere in the book, and without it the recipe is incomplete.
- It needs its other halfThe instruction to "put on the outside which must be the white" refers to a companion batter, typically the same formula made with the leftover egg whites and left uncoloured. Recipes of this kind were usually printed as a pair; without the white part the cake has no rind.
- "Red sugar"Not a distinct product but ordinary granulated sugar tinted red, sold by grocers and druggists or coloured at home. Cochineal was among the reds in common use in the nineteenth century. A cup of sugar plus gel food colouring worked into the creamed butter gives the same result, and the colour should be pushed further than looks reasonable — it fades in the oven.
- English currantsDried Zante currants, the small black grape raisin, not fresh red currants and not the sugared "currant" of jam-making. Half a pound is about 1 1/2 cups. Toss them in a little of the measured flour so they do not sink through the red batter.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F. A double-batter cake in a deep pan will likely want 45 to 55 minutes; test the centre, since the red core insulates and cooks last.
- Leavening is light by modern standardsOne teaspoon of baking powder to two cups of flour is on the low side today. Thoroughly creamed butter carries much of the lift, so cream the butter and sugar longer than you think necessary.
- Assembling the two battersLine the pan, spoon in a mound of red batter in the centre, scatter the currants, then pipe or spoon the white batter around and over it so no red touches the tin. A piping bag gives a far cleaner rind than a spoon. Keep the red core well away from the sides or it will show through when sliced.
- "Handsome frosting"A plain boiled or royal icing, white, to complete the melon effect. Some versions of the period tinted the icing pale green.
- YieldThe red batter alone uses two cups of flour, a full cake's worth; combined with a comparable quantity of white batter it will need a large deep pan and serves generously.
Watermelon cake was a fixture of American community and church cookbooks from roughly the 1870s through the turn of the century, a period when novelty cakes became a way to show off. The whole point is the reveal at the cut: a white rind, a red heart, and currants scattered through it as seeds. Recipes of this kind were nearly always printed in two halves, a "red part" and a "white part," which is why this page reads as a fragment: it was never meant to stand alone. The split use of the eggs, yolks in one batter and whites in the other, is characteristic of the period's thrift, and the same logic produced the gold-and-silver cakes that sat beside watermelon cake in the same chapters.