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Thanksgiving Cake
Make batter as for cocoa-nut cake (Miss Nettie Miller's). Bake five layers in jelly-tins; make frosting of whites of three eggs, three tea-spoons baking powder, and three-fourths pound of pulverized sugar; with frosting for first layer mix rolled hickory-nut meats, with that for second layer mix fine-sliced figs, for third with hickory-nut meats, for fourth with figs, and on the top spread the plain frosting, and grate cocoa-nut over thickly. -Mrs. J. S. Robinson.
The cake layers are conventional for the period, but the frosting is an uncooked egg-white icing that is spread between layers and left to stand, and that is where the recipe fails today.
- Raw egg whites, never heatedThe frosting is three raw whites beaten with sugar and spread on cooled layers; nothing in the method brings the egg to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the assembled cake then sits at room temperature for hours or days. Buckeye Cookery was written when eggs came from a known hen and the risk was accepted; it is not accepted now. Use a current frosting recipe — a cooked or boiled icing, or one built on pasteurized whites — rather than this one.
- The baking powder in the icingThree teaspoons of baking powder in the frosting appears to be intentional rather than a misprint, though the recipe gives no reason for it; it is not leavening in any useful sense here. Nineteenth-century powders carried a good deal of starch filler, and baking powder does turn up in some period uncooked icings, apparently to stiffen and whiten them. Modern baking powder in that quantity is likely to taste distinctly of chemical salts.
- The cross-reference"Batter as for cocoa-nut cake (Miss Nettie Miller's)" means you need that entry from the same book before you can begin. Buckeye Cookery leans on these internal references constantly, and a recipe like this one is unusable in isolation.
- Jelly-tinsJelly-tins are shallow round layer pans, typically something like 8 to 9 inches across and an inch or so deep — shallower than a modern cake pan, though the recipe specifies no size. Five of them stacked gives the tall, thin-layered cake the recipe is after.
- Pulverized sugarPulverized sugar is finely ground sugar, closest to today's confectioners' or powdered sugar, though the period product had no cornstarch in it. Three-quarters of a pound is about 3 cups.
- Hickory-nut meatsShagbark hickory nuts were free for the gathering across the Ohio Valley and appear all through this book. They are hard to buy now; pecans are the nearest relative in flavor and texture.
- Cocoa-nut, grated"Cocoa-nut" is coconut, and the instruction to grate it implies a whole nut cracked and grated fresh — unsweetened and moist — though prepared desiccated coconut was also available by this date. Packaged sweetened flake is a good deal sweeter than what the recipe assumes.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Marysville, Ohio, in 1877, assembled from contributions by named local women — hence "Mrs. J. S. Robinson" and the cross-reference to "Miss Nettie Miller's" cocoa-nut cake, which reads less like a cookbook than a record of who in town made what. A five-layer cake alternating hickory nuts and figs is a deliberate holiday extravagance: hickory nuts were local and cost nothing but labor, while figs and coconut arrived by rail and steamer and were exactly the sort of imported luxury a Midwestern household would spend on once a year. Tall stacked layer cakes of this kind became practical only after chemical leavening and reliable cookstoves spread through American kitchens mid-century, and the genre is generally traced to that shift; the name here simply marks the occasion rather than any established dish.