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White Mountain Cake
Two cups pulverized sugar, half cup butter beaten to a cream; add half cup sweet milk, two and a half cups flour, two and a half tea-spoons baking-powder in the flour, whites of eight eggs; bake in jelly-tins and put together with icing made by boiling a half teacup of water and three tea-cups sugar till thick; pour it slowly over the well-beaten whites of three eggs, and beat all together till cool. Beat before putting on each layer.
Sprinkle each layer thickly with grated cocoa-nut, and a handsome cocoa-nut cake will result. - Mrs. Dr. Stall, Union City, Ind.
A white butter cake in the 1870s idiom: all whites, no yolks, and a boiled meringue icing that doubles as the filling. The hinge is the syrup — it must reach the soft-ball stage or the icing will never set firm enough to hold coconut.
- Pulverized sugarThis means finely ground granulated sugar, not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closest match; ordinary granulated creamed thoroughly with the butter also works.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that many recipes of the period called for alongside saleratus.
- Egg whitesEight whites come to roughly a cup by modern measure; period eggs ran smaller, so measure by volume rather than count if your eggs are large. The recipe says nothing about how to treat them — beating to soft rather than stiff peaks and folding them in last is a modern reading.
- Jelly-tinsShallow round layer pans, 8 or 9 inches across and about an inch deep. This batter fills three to four of them; grease and line the bottoms with parchment.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given because ranges had none. Bake at 350F for 18 to 25 minutes, until the layers spring back and the edges just pull from the tin. Thin layers overbake quickly.
- The boiled icingThree teacups sugar to half a teacup water gives a very stiff syrup. Boil it undisturbed to 238-240F on a candy thermometer — the "till thick" of the original — then pour it into the beaten whites in a thin stream with the mixer running. Beating until fully cool is what makes it spreadable rather than grainy.
- Beat before each layerThe instruction is not padding. Boiled icing stiffens as it stands, so a brief re-beating before each layer keeps it loose enough to spread without tearing the cake.
- Grated cocoa-nutFresh coconut, cracked and grated at home, which is unsweetened and moist. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut is the nearest substitute; sweetened flake will make the cake cloying against an already very sweet icing.
- YieldA three- or four-layer cake serving 12 to 16. It is best on the day it is made — boiled icing crusts and weeps after about 24 hours.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) grew out of an Ohio church community, and its recipes carry the names and towns of the women who sent them in, as this one does. "White Mountain" was a common nineteenth-century name for a white cake finished with boiled white icing, the peaks and drifts of the meringue generally taken as the reference; the same formula appears elsewhere as snow cake or silver cake, the counterpart to the yolk-rich gold cake made from the leftovers. Two things place it in its period: baking powder, commercially available from the 1850s and used here alongside the beaten whites, and coconut, which arrived in northern American ports in quantity once regular schooner and steamer trade with the Caribbean made whole nuts a reliable grocery item. A cake this white \— no yolks, no spice, no molasses \— was a display of both refined sugar and refined flour, and of a cook who could afford to set eight yolks aside.