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Choice Fig Cake
A large cup butter, two and a half of sugar, one of sweet milk, three pints flour with three tea-spoons baking-powder, whites of sixteen eggs, a pound and a quarter of figs well floured and cut in strips like citron; no flavoring. - Mrs. A. B. Morey.
A white fruit cake on the scale of a church supper: six cups of flour and sixteen egg whites. The original gives no pan, no oven and no time, so those are the first things to settle.
- Scale and pansThree pints of flour is 6 cups, and the batter is correspondingly bulky. Divide it between two 10-inch tube pans or three or four loaf pans; a single pan of this size will not cook through before the outside dries.
- A large cup of butterCups in cookbooks of this period generally mean a half-pint, about 8 fluid ounces, and "large" here most likely means generously filled rather than a distinct measure. Take it as about 1 cup (2 sticks, 8 oz), softened.
- Sixteen egg whitesThat is about 2 cups of whites, from large eggs. Beat them to soft, glossy peaks and fold them in last; they are structure as much as leavening, alongside the baking powder.
- OvenThe original specifies none. A moderate oven, around 325F, is a reasonable modern reading; a cake this rich and this deep wants slow steady heat, roughly 1 to 1 1/2 hours in tube pans, tested with a skewer in the thickest part.
- Flouring the figsThis is the hinge. Dried figs cut in strips are heavy and sticky, and unfloured they sink to the bottom in a sheet. Toss the strips in a few tablespoons of the measured flour until every cut face is dry and dusty before folding them in.
- The figs themselvesA pound and a quarter of soft dried figs, stems trimmed, sliced lengthwise into citron-width strips. If they are leathery, steam them briefly and dry them well before flouring, or they will pull moisture from the crumb.
- "No flavoring"Deliberate, not an omission. The point of the cake is fig against plain sweet crumb, so resist adding vanilla or almond.
- Yolks left overSixteen yolks are the real cost of this recipe. Cookbooks of the period often printed gold cake beside white cake for just this reason, and yolks also went into custards and boiled dressings; refrigerate them under a little water and use within a day or two.
- ServingTwo tube cakes will give 30 to 40 slices. The crumb improves on the second day, wrapped tightly once fully cool.
Egg-white cakes filled the pages of American cookbooks in the 1870s and 1880s, when "silver cake" and "gold cake" were often printed side by side so a household could use up a bowl of whites and a bowl of yolks without waste. The fig here points to the same commercial pantry as citron and currants: dried figs, many of them said to have come from Smyrna in the Ottoman Aegean, had by the time Buckeye Cookery appeared in 1877 apparently become cheap and reliable enough that a Midwestern cook could treat them as a fairly ordinary ingredient, and the instruction to cut them "in strips like citron" assumes the reader knows exactly how candied peel is handled. The recipe arrives credited to a contributor by name, with the quantities and none of the method.