Home › Layer-Cakes › Minnehahaa Cake
Minnehahaa Cake
MINNEHAHA CAKE. five- One and a half cups granulated sugar, half cup butter stirred to a cream, whites of six eggs, or three whole eggs, two tea-spoons cream tartar stirred in two heaping cups sifted flour, one tea-spoop Mu soda in half cup sweet milk; bake in three layers. For filling, take a tea cup sugar and a little water boiled together until it is brittle into the well-beaten white of an egg; add to this a cup of stoned 200 raisins chopped fine, or a cup of chopped hickory-nut meats, and place between layers and over the top. A universal favorite.- Mrs. E. W. Herrick, Minneapolis, Minn.
A plain white layer cake with a boiled frosting, printed from a badly set page. Two words are garbled by the typesetting and one stray page number has landed in the middle of the filling.
- Reading the garbled text"one tea-spoop Mu soda" is one teaspoon of soda, and "a cup of stoned 200 raisins" is a cup of stoned raisins with the page number 200 dropped in. The "five-" after the title is stray type carried in from the printed page, not an ingredient.
- Saleratus and cream of tartarSoda and cream of tartar -- Soda here is baking soda, and the two teaspoons of cream of tartar sifted through the flour are what activate it. Together they do the work of roughly four teaspoons of modern baking powder, but they begin reacting the moment the milk goes in, so get the batter into the pans and into the oven without delay.
- Sweet milkSweet milk means ordinary fresh whole milk, as opposed to the soured or buttermilk called for elsewhere in the book.
- EggsSix whites give a pale, fine-grained white cake; three whole eggs give a yellower, slightly denser crumb. If you use the six whites, beat them stiff and fold them in last rather than stirring them into the batter.
- Oven and pansThe recipe gives no oven direction beyond "bake in three layers." In a modern kitchen, three 8- or 9-inch round pans at 350F for 20 to 25 minutes. The layers are meant to be thin; do not divide this batter into two pans and expect it to bake through.
- The hinge: how far to boil the syrup"Until it is brittle" describes hard-crack sugar, around 300F, which will set glassy and unspreadable by the time you have finished folding in the raisins. For a boiled icing that stays soft enough to spread, take the syrup to the firm-ball stage, 240 to 245F, and pour it in a thin stream into the beaten white while whisking constantly.
- Hickory nutsHickory-nut meats were gathered rather than bought and are hard to find now; pecans are the closest relation in flavor and texture. Chop them fine as directed or the icing will not spread cleanly.
- Raw white in the fillingThe hot syrup cooks the egg white only partially. If you are serving anyone who should avoid undercooked egg, use pasteurized whites.
- YieldOne three-layer cake, twelve to sixteen servings. The filling as written is enough for two layers and the top, with the sides left bare in the period manner.
The name was popularized by Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha (1855), whose heroine Minnehaha bore a name the poet glossed, romantically, as "laughing water" — though the falls in Minneapolis were already known as Minnehaha before the poem, Longfellow having taken the name from earlier accounts of the Dakota word, among them Mary Eastman's Dahcotah (1849). In the poem's wake the name attached itself to hotels, steamboats and cakes. That Mrs. E. W. Herrick sent this in from Minneapolis is no accident: the cake was a point of local pride, and versions of it circulated through community cookbooks for the rest of the century, generally a white layer cake finished with a boiled frosting studded with raisins or nuts. Boiled icing of this kind — sugar syrup whipped into egg white — was a common alternative to a plain butter-and-sugar frosting. Buckeye Cookery, which grew out of an Ohio church fundraising effort in 1877, gathered contributions from women across the Midwest, and the attributions read as a map of where its readers lived.