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Washington Pie
1 cup white sugar 1 egg 1 cup sweet cream 1 teaspoon cream of tartar ½ teaspoon soda ½ teaspoon salt Five Roses to make medium stiff batter Nutmeg or lemon Bake in 2 plates. Spread 1 cake with jelly and place the other on top. Serve cold.
A two-layer butterless cake baked in pie plates and sandwiched with jelly. The only real difficulty is that the flour is unmeasured, so the batter has to be judged by feel.
- "Five Roses to make medium stiff batter"Five Roses was the brand of flour the book was published to sell; use any all-purpose flour. A medium stiff batter here means one that drops heavily from the spoon rather than pours; roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups is a likely amount for this quantity of sugar, egg and cream. Add it gradually and stop while the batter still slumps in the bowl.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" means fresh and unsoured, as opposed to the sour milk or buttermilk used elsewhere in the period. Cream of the period varied in richness; modern whipping cream (35%) is a reasonable substitute, and the cream supplies most of the fat in the cake, since there is no butter.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTogether these are homemade baking powder: the soda is the base, the cream of tartar the acid that releases it. The 2:1 ratio here is correct, but the reaction begins the moment the liquid goes in, so get the batter into the pans and the oven without delay.
- OvenThe original gives none. Bake at 350F to 375F; thin layers in pie plates take roughly 20 to 25 minutes and are done when the centre springs back.
- "Bake in 2 plates"Two pie plates or round cake pans, roughly 8 or 9 inches, greased and floured. The batter is divided between them, giving two thin layers rather than the tall sponge a modern cake pan produces.
- Nutmeg or lemonNo amount is given. A quarter teaspoon of grated nutmeg, or the zest of one lemon, is in keeping; a teaspoon of lemon extract does the same job.
- The jellyAny firm-set red jelly or jam works, but spread it on cooled layers or it soaks through and the cake collapses. Raspberry and currant were common choices.
- YieldOne filled two-layer cake, cut in wedges like a pie, serving about eight. It is best eaten fresh.
Washington pie is neither a pie nor named for anything the president is documented to have eaten, but a product of the 19th-century habit of baking cake batter in pie plates and calling the result a pie. Cut in wedges and served cold, it belonged to the same family as Boston cream pie, and appeared in New England and Canadian cookbooks throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, usually with jam or jelly between the layers rather than custard. Its appearance in a flour-company cookbook is telling: the Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to move Manitoba hard-wheat flour into Canadian kitchens, and recipes like this one, with no butter, one egg and no fixed flour measure, were written for cooks who worked by the look of the batter.