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Silver Part (Two cups sugar two-thirds cup)
Two cups sugar, two-thirds cup butter, not quite two-thirds cup sweet milk, whites of eight eggs, three heaping teaspoons baking-powder thoroughly sifted, with three cups flour; stir sugar and butter to a cream, add milk and flour, and last white of eggs.
Gold Part. One cup sugar, three-fourths cup butter, half cup sweet milk, one and a half tea-spoons baking-powder sifted in a little more than one and a half cups flour, yolks of seven eggs thoroughly beaten, and one whole egg, one tea-spoon allspice, and cinnamon until you can taste it; bake the white in two long pie-tins. Put half the gold in a pie-tin, and lay on one pound halved figs (previously sifted over with flour), so that they will just touch each other; put on the rest of the gold, and bake. Put the cakes together with frosting while warm, the gold between the white ones, and cover with frosting.-Miss Tina Lay, Clyde, O.
A late-Victorian gold-and-silver cake: two batters, one built on whites and one on yolks, stacked with a fig layer hidden inside the yolk cake. The original assumes a cook who knows her own stove, so the numbers below fill in what it leaves out.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake both batters at 350F; the shallow silver sheets will take about 20-25 minutes, the fig-filled gold sheet 30-35 because of the fruit and the extra depth.
- "Long pie-tins"Probably shallow oblong tins rather than deep cake pans. A quarter-sheet pan (about 9x13) lined with parchment gives a similar thin, flat layer to the one this assembly depends on.
- Butter and saltButter of the period was usually salted, and no salt is listed. If you use unsalted butter, about 3/4 teaspoon of salt in the silver batter and 1/2 teaspoon in the gold brings the seasoning closer to the original.
- Baking powderThree heaping teaspoons come to something like a tablespoon and a half of leavening across three cups of flour, generous even for the single-acting powders of the period. Two to three level teaspoons of modern double-acting powder per three cups of flour is enough; more can give a coarse crumb and a soapy edge.
- Egg countEggs then are generally reckoned to have run smaller than today's large. By modern large eggs, eight whites measure about one cup, and seven yolks plus one whole egg roughly two-thirds cup. Measure rather than count.
- "Cinnamon until you can taste it"Start at one teaspoon cinnamon with the one teaspoon allspice and judge the raw batter. The spice is meant to be clearly present, since it carries the gold layer against the plain white ones.
- The figsDried figs, halved, tossed in flour so they do not sink, and set so they just touch. This is the hinge of the recipe: a single continuous fig stratum in the middle of the gold cake. Skip the flour dusting and they slide to the bottom and stick.
- Frosting while warmThis suits a boiled or cooked white icing, which sets as it cools and glues warm layers together. A modern buttercream applied to a warm cake will melt and slide.
- Assembly and yieldTwo silver sheets outside, the fig-studded gold sheet between, frosted over the top and sides. Trimmed and cut into squares it serves 16 to 20.
Gold and silver cake was a thrifty piece of Victorian showmanship: white cake takes only whites, yellow cake only yolks, and baking the two together in one dessert used up a dozen or more eggs without waste in a kitchen where keeping leftover yolks was awkward. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (which follows the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book of 1876) is a compiled book, and this entry is credited to a named contributor from Clyde, Ohio, in the pattern the book uses throughout, which is why the instructions read like one cook talking to another rather than a tested formula. The dried figs are the mark of the period as much as anything else: imported Smyrna figs were an ordinary grocery item in the American Midwest by the 1870s, and pressed fig layers, fig fillings and fig puddings appear in cookbooks of the decade.