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Kelly Island Cake
One cup butter, two of sugar, three of flour, four eggs, half cup. milk, three tea-spoons baking-powder; bake in jelly-tins. For filling, stir together a grated lemon, a large grated tart apple, an egg, and a cup sugar, and boil four minutes. A very excellent cake.-Miss Greeley Grubbs.
A plain butter cake in the old counting order — one, two, three, four — with a cooked lemon-apple curd between the layers. The filling is the whole point, and it is the only part that needs judgment.
- The measurements are by volume, and generousOne cup butter is 8 oz (two sticks), two cups sugar about 14 oz, three cups flour roughly 13-15 oz depending on how it is scooped. Weigh the flour at 13 oz if you want the lighter crumb; the batter is stiff and will take creaming.
- "Jelly-tins"Shallow round layer pans, 8 or 9 inches across, greased and floured. This quantity of batter fills three of them; four gives thinner layers and more filling to cake, which suits the recipe better.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the book assumes a wood range. Bake at 350F for 20-25 minutes for three pans, 15-18 for four, until the centers spring back.
- "A grated lemon"Most likely the whole fruit, grated down — peel, pith and flesh — rather than zest alone, though the recipe does not say. Read that way, it accounts for the bitterness and body. Grate over a bowl so no juice is lost, and stop at the seeds.
- The filling is the hingeEgg, sugar, grated apple and grated lemon boiled four minutes is a curd thickened by both egg and apple pectin. Cook it in a heavy pan over medium heat, stirring constantly from the moment it warms; four minutes at a true boil is enough to set it and to bring the egg well past 160F. If it looks thin, it will thicken as it cools.
- Choose the apple for acid, not sweetness"Large tart apple" points to a hard cooking apple; Northern Spy and Rhode Island Greening were varieties of the period, and Granny Smith serves as a modern stand-in. A sweet modern eating apple gives a flat, cloying filling.
- AssemblyCool the layers and the filling completely before spreading, or the curd will slide. One batch of filling covers two or three layers thinly; double it if you want a thick seam.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons in three cups of flour is in line with modern practice. If your baking powder is single-acting or old, the cake will be heavy — get the pans into the oven promptly either way.
- YieldOne three-layer cake, twelve to sixteen slices. Best eaten within a couple of days under a dome; the filling is liable to weep after that.
Kelley's Island sits in Lake Erie off Sandusky, Ohio, and in the 1870s it was known for two things: limestone quarries and vineyards, its warm lake-moderated soil making it one of the state's great grape-growing districts. A cake named for it in an Ohio community cookbook is local pride rather than local produce — nothing in the recipe is islandish, and the spelling has slipped a letter. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was compiled from such contributions, and this one carries its donor's name, Miss Greeley Grubbs, in the manner of a church-supper collection where the credit was part of the payment. The cake itself is the standard American one-two-three-four formula; what distinguishes it is the filling, a grated-fruit curd of the sort that let a cook build a rich layer cake in winter out of a stored apple and a bought lemon, with no fresh berries or cream in reach.