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Red Part (Whites of four eggs one cupful)
Whites of four eggs, one cupful of sugar, two tablespoonfuls of butter, half a cup of milk, one and one-half cupfuls of flour, one teaspoonful of baking powder, and one tablespoonful of blush, flavored with rose. This may be made a more delicate shade of red by using half the quantity of blush.
This is one tinted layer from a multi-colored cake, so the page gives ingredients but no method or oven. The proportions are a standard small white layer cake, and it can be handled as one.
- "Blush"Apparently a period name for a prepared red cake coloring; such colorings were sold ready-bottled, cochineal and later coal-tar reds both being in use. A tablespoon of modern liquid food color would be far too much; use gel or liquid coloring a few drops at a time until the batter is the shade you want, and note the original's own advice that half the quantity gives a more delicate pink.
- Rose flavoringRose water, then a common baking flavor alongside lemon and almond. Modern rose water and rose extract vary greatly in strength: start with half a teaspoon of extract or a teaspoon of rose water, taste the batter, and add more. Overdosed rose reads as soap.
- Method the recipe assumesNo method is given, but the usual handling for a cake of this type would be: cream the butter with the sugar, add milk alternately with the flour sifted with the baking powder, stir in the coloring and flavoring, then fold in the whites beaten to soft peaks last.
- Butter quantityTwo tablespoons for a cup of sugar is very lean by modern standards. The result will be a pale, close, fairly firm crumb, which suits a layer meant to be stacked.
- FlourUse cake flour if you have it; a lower-protein flour suits a cake this delicate. Period household flour varied widely in strength.
- OvenNone is given. As a modern working figure, 350F; a single thin layer in a greased and floured 8-inch pan takes roughly 20 to 25 minutes, until the center springs back and a tester comes out clean.
- YieldOne 8- or 9-inch layer, or two very thin ones. It is one tinted part of a multi-colored cake and was intended to be baked and stacked with its companion layers.
Tinted layer cakes were popular on late-Victorian and Edwardian tables, where a cake sliced to reveal bands of color did the work that decoration does now. Reliable chemical baking powder and ready-bottled food coloring both helped make such cakes practical in ordinary kitchens; cochineal was long the standard red, though coal-tar dyes were also in food use from the later nineteenth century. Recipes of this kind are often printed part by part, one paragraph each, which is likely why this one begins abruptly and never mentions an oven.