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Almond Cream Cake
On beaten whites of ten eggs, sift one and a half goblets pulverized sugar, and a goblet flour through which has been stirred a heaping tea-spoon cream tartar; stir very gently and do not heat it; bake in jelly-pans. For cream, take a half pint sweet cream, yolks of three eggs, table-spoon pulverized sugar, tea-spoon corn starch; dissolve starch smoothly with a little milk, beat yolks and sugar together with this, boil the cream, and stir these ingredients in as for any cream-cake filling, only make a little thicker; blanch and chop fine a half pound almonds and stir into the cream. Put together like jelly cake while icing is soft, and stick in a half pound of almonds split in two. - Mrs. Paris Gibson, Minneapolis, Minn.
A white layer cake in the emerging angel-cake style, filled with an almond pastry cream. Two things carry it: the whites must stay aerated, and the custard must be cooked thick enough to hold between layers.
- The gobletBuckeye Cookery measures by household glassware; a goblet is generally reckoned at about a cup, but the size varied from house to house. Treat it as 1 cup and expect roughly 1½ cups sugar to 1 cup flour, which is consistent with an angel-type batter.
- "Do not heat it"Possibly a typesetter's slip for "do not beat it," though the text as printed reads "heat." Either way, fold the sugar and flour into the whites gently; beating at this stage collapses the foam and gives a tough, shallow layer.
- Flour and cream of tartarSift the flour and cream of tartar together two or three times before adding. Flour varied a great deal by mill and region; if your layers come out tough, cake flour will give a lighter crumb.
- Jelly-pansShallow round layer pans; 8 or 9 inches is a reasonable modern equivalent. The recipe does not say how many layers to expect, but ten whites will divide into three or four thin ones.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. As a modern starting point, 325-350F works: egg-white batters brown and dry quickly, and the layers are done when the top springs back, around 15-20 minutes for thin ones.
- The fillingA standard pastry cream. Scald the half pint of cream, temper it into the yolk-sugar-cornstarch mixture, then return to the heat and cook until it visibly thickens and the starch flavour is gone. The instruction to make it "a little thicker" than usual matters — a loose cream will slide out from between the layers.
- AlmondsBlanch by pouring boiling water over the almonds, standing a minute, then slipping off the skins. The recipe calls for a half pound chopped into the cream and another half pound split for the top, which is a full pound in total.
- The icingNo icing recipe is given; the book assumes you know one. A plain confectioners' or boiled white icing would suit, and the split almonds go in while it is still soft so they set in place.
- YieldOne cake of three or four layers; the recipe gives no serving count, but 12 to 16 is a fair estimate. Assemble close to serving and refrigerate -- the custard filling will not keep at room temperature.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was compiled from contributions sent in by women across the Midwest, and the credit line here points to Minneapolis, where Paris Gibson ran a woolen mill, the North Star, before he moved west and became associated with Great Falls, Montana. Egg-white cakes leavened with cream of tartar spread rapidly through American community cookbooks in the 1870s and 1880s, the same window in which the name "angel food" took hold, and recipes like this one — whites only in the layers, the leftover yolks turned into the filling — show the thrift that kept the style practical in a household kitchen.