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Orange Cake
Two cups of sugar, two and one-quarter cups of flour, one-half cup of water, yolks of five eggs, whites of four eggs, grated rind of one orange, one teaspoon of cream tartar, one-half teaspoon of soda. Bake in four tins. Filling: Whites of two eggs, add pulverized sugar till stiff, the grated rind of one orange and the juice of two, to which add sufficient sugar to spread. -Mrs J. B. Hobbs, Chicago.
The cake itself is a fatless hot-water sponge, but the filling is an uncooked meringue icing built on raw egg whites, and that is the part that fails a modern kitchen.
- Why the filling is the problemTwo raw whites beaten with sugar and citrus juice are never heated at any point; the acid in orange juice does not pasteurize anything. Uncooked egg-white icing carries a real Salmonella risk. Use a current recipe for a cooked or Swiss-meringue style icing instead.
- Pulverized sugarThe period term for what is now sold as confectioners' or powdered sugar. Period pulverized sugar was generally ground cane sugar without the cornstarch found in the modern product, which may make the icing set up slightly less.
- Cream of tartar and sodaOne teaspoon cream of tartar with half a teaspoon of soda is the era's homemade baking powder, roughly equivalent to about two teaspoons of modern double-acting powder. The mixture reacts on contact with liquid, so batter made this way will not wait.
- No fat at allThere is no butter or oil in the list, which puts this in the sponge family rather than the butter-cake family. The lift comes entirely from the eggs, so the whites need to be beaten stiff and folded in last even though the recipe never says so.
- Four tinsMost likely four shallow layer tins, probably of the 8- or 9-inch sort, giving thin layers to be stacked with the filling. Modern 2-inch-deep pans will produce something quite different.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. A sponge of this kind is normally baked in a moderate oven, around 350F, until the layers spring back; thin layers in shallow tins bake fast, likely closer to 15 minutes than 30.
- Grated rindThe rind of one orange goes in the cake and the rind of another in the filling, along with the juice of two; two oranges, zested first and then juiced, will cover everything. Take only the coloured zest; the white pith underneath is bitter and will show in a cake this plain.
Orange cake ran through American community and magazine cookbooks from the 1870s onward, and its appearance here, signed by a contributor from Chicago, is typical of how such collections were assembled: readers sent in what worked in their own kitchens and the recipes were printed under their names. The dish depended on two things becoming ordinary at once, cheap refined sugar and citrus shipped north by rail, which made a fresh orange in a Chicago winter a modest luxury rather than an impossibility. The construction, thin fatless layers stacked with a stiff sweetened egg-white filling, was a common "layer cake" pattern of the period, with the filling doubling as frosting.