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Ice-Cream Cake (One-fourth pound each butter)
One-fourth pound each butter and powdered sugar, half pint milk, half pound flour, six eggs, one glass wine, one nutmeg; bake quickly in iron gem-pans. They raise light with hollow center. When cold, cut a round hole in top (as you would "plug" a melon), fill with ice-cream just before serving, so that it will not have time to melt.-Mrs. A. C. Glazier, Chicago, Ill.
A rich, eggy batter baked hot in cast-iron gem pans so it puffs and hollows like a popover, then plugged and filled with ice cream at the table. Everything depends on the pans being hot and the cakes being filled at the last moment.
- The weights in cupsA quarter pound of butter is 1 stick (1/2 cup); a quarter pound of powdered sugar is roughly 1 cup, sifted. Half a pound of flour is about 1 3/4 cups, and half a pint of milk is 1 cup.
- No leavener, by designThere is no baking powder or soda here. The lift comes entirely from the six eggs and from steam, which is why the cakes "raise light with hollow center." Beat the whites separately and fold them in if you want reliable volume.
- Gem pansNineteenth-century gem pans are heavy cast-iron muffin or popover pans. Grease them well and heat them in the oven before the batter goes in; a cold pan gives a dense cake with no hollow.
- "Bake quickly"The recipe gives no temperature; 'quick' in these books means a hot oven, which in modern terms is somewhere in the region of 400-450F. The high heat is what sets the outer shell fast enough for steam to blow the center open.
- One glass wineA wineglass in these books is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, so roughly 1/4 cup. Sherry, madeira and sweet white wines all appear in cakes of the period; the recipe does not specify which.
- One nutmegA whole grated nutmeg is around 2 to 3 teaspoons and will dominate everything. Half that is closer to modern taste, and pre-ground nutmeg is weaker still than freshly grated.
- Filling and timingCut the plug only after the cakes are completely cold, and fill within a minute or two of serving. Warm cake and ice cream turn to soup faster than the original suggests.
- YieldThe batter makes about 12 standard gem cakes, so a dozen servings.
Buckeye Cookery (Ohio, 1877) is a community book built from contributed receipts, and this one carries Mrs. A. C. Glazier's name and city in the usual way. "Ice-cream cake" in the 1870s did not mean the frozen layered slab sold today; it meant cake and ice cream served together, here in the neat trick of hollowing a hot-baked gem and plugging it like a melon. The technique depends on gem pans, the heavy cast-iron muffin pans that produced the popover-like shells this recipe relies on. Wine and a whole grated nutmeg were ordinary cake flavorings then. The insistence on filling at the last moment is a reminder that ice cream in 1877 came out of a hand-cranked freezer packed with ice and salt, held in a cellar or an icebox, and was never far from melting.