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Jersey Lily Cake
½ cup butter 1 cup granulated sugar 1 cup sweet milk 2 eggs (whites) 1 teaspoon vanilla 2 teaspoons baking powder 2 cups Five Roses flour Raisins Chopped walnuts.
Cream butter and sugar. Add whites beaten stiff, also milk, vanilla, baking powder and sifted flour. Put half the batter in a small dripping pan, then put a layer of seeded raisins and a layer of chopped walnuts, and finally the balance of the batter. Bake in moderate oven.
Ice and put whole walnut meats on top.
A plain white butter cake with a hidden band of raisins and walnuts, of the kind meant to be mixed in one bowl and baked in whatever shallow pan the kitchen had. The original assumes a cook who knows her own oven, so the two things it leaves out are temperature and time.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. A cake this shallow will be done in 30 to 40 minutes; test with a skewer in the centre, not at the edge, since the fruit layer holds moisture.
- Sweet milkOrdinary whole milk. The term only exists to distinguish it from sour or buttermilk, which would have called for soda instead of baking powder.
- Dripping panA shallow rectangular roasting pan. A 9-inch square or an 8x11 tin is about the right size for this quantity of batter, split into two layers with the fruit between.
- Order of mixingSift the baking powder with the flour rather than adding it loose as written, or it will streak. Add the flour and milk alternately to the creamed butter and sugar, and fold the stiff whites in last so they are not knocked down.
- Unmeasured fruit and nutsNo quantity is given. About ¾ cup raisins and ¾ cup chopped walnuts fills a pan this size without the middle layer sliding. Keep the fruit an inch clear of the pan edges so the two batter layers seal together.
- Seeded raisins'Seeded' meant raisins whose seeds had been taken out, by hand or by machine; seedless varieties were also on the market by this period. Modern seedless raisins need no preparation, though a brief soak in hot water keeps them from drying in the crumb.
- IcingA period cake of this sort took either a boiled white icing or a simple confectioners' sugar and water glaze. Both set firm enough to hold whole walnut halves; a soft buttercream will let them slide.
- YieldTwelve to sixteen squares, cut in the pan.
The Jersey Lily was Lillie Langtry, the Jersey-born actress and society figure whose face sold soap, postcards and sheet music across the English-speaking world from the 1880s onward; the nickname turns up attached to pale white cakes of this sort, as Lady Baltimore was attached to others. Naming a cake after a celebrity or a fictional figure was common in community and promotional cookbooks, and the Five Roses Cook Book — issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and built largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who baked with the company's flour — is full of such borrowings. The recipe itself is a straightforward white cake, egg whites only for a light crumb, with the raisins and walnuts hidden in a seam rather than stirred through, which keeps the batter from turning grey and gives a cross-section worth looking at.