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Orange Cake (One cup butter one of water)
One cup butter, one of water, two of sugar, four of flour, three eggs, three tea-spoons baking powder; bake in layers. Take the juice of two large or three small, oranges, coffee-cup pulverized sugar, one egg; mix yolk of egg, sugar, and juice together; beat whites to a stiff froth, stir in and spread between the layers. -Mrs. W. B. Brown, Washington D. C.
The cake layers themselves are a straightforward 19th-century butter cake, but the filling is an uncooked raw-egg orange sauce, and that is the part that cannot be carried over.
- The filling is the problemRaw yolk and raw white are beaten with juice and sugar and spread between the layers with no cooking at any stage. Nothing in the recipe brings the egg above room temperature, so there is no step that would deal with Salmonella in the shell egg, and the assembled cake then sits at room temperature while the acid and sugar do nothing to sterilize it. For an orange filling, use a current recipe with a cooked curd or pasteurized egg.
- Cup measuresThe cups here are volume measures of roughly 8 fl oz, though period cups were not standardised. Four cups of flour is about 500 g if scooped, less if spooned and levelled; weighing gives a more consistent crumb than measuring by cup.
- "Coffee-cup" is ambiguousA coffee cup in this period runs anywhere from about 3/4 cup to a full cup, and the book uses the term loosely alongside tea-cup. Do not treat it as a precise conversion.
- Pulverized sugarThis is what would now be sold as superfine or caster sugar, ground finer than granulated but not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar of today.
- No oven temperature givenA modern equivalent would be around 350F, with thin layers in 8- or 9-inch pans taking roughly 20 to 25 minutes; the original assumed a cook who judged a wood range by hand and by the colour of a scrap of paper.
- Butter and water, not milkThe liquid is plain water, which appears in a number of period baking-powder cakes and gives a lighter, less tender crumb than a milk batter. It is not an omission or a misprint.
- YieldFour cups of flour makes a substantial cake: three 8-inch layers, or two thicker 9-inch layers, serving 10 to 12.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (Ohio, first published in the mid-1870s) was assembled from contributions by named housewives across the country, which is why this page carries a Washington, D.C. address rather than an author's byline — the book's authority came from the collective testimony of women who had actually baked the thing. Layer cakes like this one belong to the first generation of American baking after chemical leavening became reliable and cheap: three teaspoons of baking powder doing work that would once have demanded beaten eggs, saleratus and sour milk, or hours of creaming. Oranges in a Midwestern kitchen of the 1870s were a seasonal luxury shipped in from Florida or the Mediterranean, most abundant in winter, which is part of why orange-filled cakes read as celebration food in books of this era. The uncooked juice-and-egg filling is entirely typical of the period, when raw egg was used freely in icings and fillings.