Home › Cake-Making › Almond Cake
Almond Cake
Two cups sugar, three-fourths cup butter, one of sweet milk, two of flour, and one of corn starch well mixed, whites of six eggs, two tea-spoons cream tartar in the flour, one tea-spoon soda in the milk; cream the butter and sugar, add milk gradually, then the whites of eggs together with the flour, and bake in jelly-tins. To put between layers, take two pounds almonds, blanch and pound fine in a mortar (or a cloth will do), beat whites and yolks of two eggs together lightly, add a cup and a half sugar, then the almonds, with one table-spoon vanilla. - Mrs. Harvey Wood.
A white layer cake of the standard 1870s type, paired with an almond filling that is built on raw eggs and never cooked. The cake batter is sound; the filling is the problem.
- The uncooked fillingThe almond layer is two whole raw eggs beaten with sugar, ground almonds and vanilla, spread between baked layers and never heated. Nothing in the assembled cake brings that filling anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella in egg is destroyed, and it then sits at room temperature. Use a current recipe for an almond or frangipane filling, one that is cooked or built on pasteurized egg.
- Jelly-tinsRound shallow layer pans, roughly 8 to 9 inches across and an inch or so deep. The recipe does not say how many layers; this quantity of batter should fill three or four, and four gives thinner, more evenly baked layers.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; period stoves had no gauge. In a modern oven, shallow layers of this kind bake at about 350F for 20 to 25 minutes.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTwo teaspoons cream of tartar with one teaspoon soda is the period's homemade baking powder, and the reason the acid goes into the flour and the alkali into the milk: they are kept apart until the batter comes together. Commercial baking powder was available by the 1870s, though home-mixed cream of tartar and soda remained in common use.
- Corn starchOne cup of cornstarch to two of flour lowers the protein of the mixture and gives the fine, tender crumb associated with white cake. It is the same principle as substituting cake flour, which was not yet a supermarket staple.
- Sweet milkPlain unsoured whole milk. The distinction mattered when sour milk and buttermilk were separate leavening ingredients in their own right.
- Two pounds of almondsThat is a very large quantity by modern proportions, enough to fill several cakes. Nineteenth-century almond fillings were dense and generously laid on, but the figure is worth noting before anyone buys to it.
- Blanching and poundingBlanching means a brief scald so the brown skins slip off. The mortar or cloth produces an oily, slightly coarse paste rather than the dry powder of packaged almond flour, which is why the texture of these old fillings was closer to marzipan.
- YieldThree or four layers, serving roughly twelve to sixteen.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) grew out of an Ohio church compilation and became one of the most widely reprinted American household books of the century, its recipes signed by the women who contributed them. Its cake chapter is full of white cakes like this one, which use only the whites and so pair naturally with the gold cakes and custards elsewhere in the book that used up the yolks. Almonds were largely imported and sold whole and skin-on, and blanching and pounding two pounds of them by hand in a mortar was heavy labor, suggesting a cake for a company table rather than everyday baking. The jelly-tin layer cake itself was a comparatively new fashion, spreading with cheap stamped tinware and more reliable cast-iron ranges after the Civil War.