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Peanut Layer Cake
One and one-half cups of sugar, one-half cup of shortening, two eggs, one cup of milk, flour enough to make a soft dough, two teaspoons of baking powder; flavor with vanilla. Cream butter and sugar, add eggs well beaten, then add milk, flour, baking powder, and flavoring.
Filling-One cup of milk, let boil; enough cornstarch, wet with cold milk to thicken; remove from fire, and add one wellbeaten egg, a pinch of salt, sweeten to suit taste, then add one cup of peanuts, chopped fine.
For top of cake make plain frosting.
— Mrs. William Schubert
A plain 1-2-3 style butter cake with a cornstarch pastry-cream filling. The only vague instruction is the flour, and the filling needs one change in handling.
- "Flour enough to make a soft dough"This is a batter, not a dough. With 1 1/2 cups sugar, 1/2 cup fat, 2 eggs and 1 cup milk, expect about 2 1/2 to 2 3/4 cups of flour "
- Shortening means butter hereShortening most likely means butter here -- the method says "cream butter and sugar," so read the half cup of shortening as butter. Modern vegetable shortening will work but gives a blander flavour.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to roughly 2 1/2 cups flour is on the low side by current standards; if your baking powder is more than a few months open, replace it rather than adding more.
- Oven and pansNo temperature or baking time is given at all. For a two-layer cake, bake in two greased 8- or 9-inch round pans at 350F, 25 to 30 minutes, until the centre springs back.
- The filling is a pastry cream"Enough cornstarch" is about 2 tablespoons per cup of milk, slaked in a few tablespoons of cold milk before it goes into the hot. Cook it a full minute after it thickens or it will taste chalky.
- The egg in the fillingBeating one raw egg into the pudding off the heat, as written, leaves it below a safe temperature. Temper the egg with a little hot pudding, return the pan to low heat, and stir until it reaches 160F and coats a spoon.
- PeanutsUse roasted unsalted peanuts, chopped fine but not to a paste. Salted cocktail peanuts will make the filling taste sharp against the sweetened milk.
- "Plain frosting"An uncooked sugar icing; the term was used in this period for both milk- or water-thinned icings and simple egg-white ones. A milk or water icing of about 1 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar with 2 to 3 teaspoons liquid, spread thin while the cake is cool, will suit it.
- YieldOne two-layer cake, 8 to 10 servings. Fill and frost the day you serve it; the cornstarch filling weeps after a day in the refrigerator.
Peanuts moved from a street-vendor snack to a baking ingredient in American home kitchens in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as commercial roasting and shelling made them cheap and reliably clean; cookbooks of the 1890s onward begin showing peanut cakes, peanut cookies and peanut macaroons alongside the older almond and hickory-nut recipes. What is telling about this receipt is the frugality of the construction: an ordinary cup cake batter, a cornstarch-and-milk filling of the kind that stretched a single egg across a whole cake, and chopped peanuts. Recipes contributed under a contributor's own married name, as here, appear to be characteristic of the kind of community-compiled cookbook this seems to be, where the point was less novelty than a record of what actually got made in local kitchens.