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French Cream Cake
Three eggs, one cup granulated sugar, one and a half cups flour, two table-spoons cold water, tea-spoon baking powder. This is enough for two cakes baked in pie-pans, to be split while warm, spreading the hot custard between them, or for four cakes baked in. jelly-pans, with the hot custard spread between them, the latter being the preferable plan. For custard, boil nearly one pint sweet milk; mix two table-spoons corn starch with a half tea-cup sweet milk, add two well-beaten eggs: when milk has boiled add nearly a cup sugar, and add gradually the corn starch and eggs, stirring briskly; add a half cup butter, stirring until dissolved, flavor with one tea-spoon vanilla, and spread between cakes while hot. This cake can be used as a pudding by pouring over each piece a spoonful of the custard that is left. - Mrs. Charles Morey.
A fatless sponge split and filled with hot pastry cream — essentially a Boston cream pie by another name. The custard is the part that needs attention.
- Cook the cornstarch outThe hinge is bringing the custard back to a full boil after the starch-and-egg slurry goes in, and holding it there half a minute while stirring. Cornstarch does not reach full thickening power until it boils, and the brief boil also cooks the raw egg. Pulled too early it stays thin and tastes chalky.
- No oven temperature givenBake the layers at 350F. Jelly-pan layers take 12 to 15 minutes, the thicker pie-pan cakes 20 to 25, until the top springs back.
- PansJelly-pans are shallow round layer tins, 8 or 9 inches. Pie-pans of the period were about the same width but deeper. Line the bottoms with parchment; a fatless sponge grips bare metal.
- A tea-cup is not a cupPeriod recipes generally treat a tea-cup as smaller than the standard cup — somewhere around a half to three-quarters of a cup. Here it only slackens the cornstarch, so the exact figure does not matter; use enough cold milk to make a smooth, pourable slurry.
- Half a cup of butterThat is 4 oz, a very rich filling by modern pastry-cream standards. Stir it in off the heat, in pieces, once the custard has thickened. Half that amount gives a filling that spreads more cleanly and still tastes buttery.
- Beating the spongeWith no butter in the batter and only a teaspoon of baking powder, most of the lift comes from the eggs. Beat the whole eggs and sugar until pale and tripled in volume, then fold in the sifted flour and water. Baking powder formulations have changed since the 1870s and modern powder is generally reckoned stronger, so measure level.
- Filling while hotSpreading hot custard on warm cake makes it soak in, which is the intent. It also means the assembled cake will not slice tidily until it has cooled and set for an hour or two.
- Yield and keepingFour thin layers serve eight to ten. Because the filling is an egg-and-dairy custard, refrigerate anything not eaten the same day and finish it within two days.
"French cream cake" was a standard American name in the 1870s and 80s for sponge layers filled with boiled custard — crème pâtissière, the French connection being the filling rather than any French original. The same construction appears in period books as cream pie, custard cake and Boston cream pie, the last of which stuck; the loose use of pie and cake is often said to follow from the thing being baked in pie-tins. Cornstarch is what dates the recipe: commercially refined corn starch became widely available to American households after the mid-century. Buckeye Cookery was assembled from contributed recipes, some of them signed, and the signature here — Mrs. Charles Morey, under her husband's name, as was the convention — is a reminder that these books were community documents as much as instruction manuals.