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Cake Filli Ings and Icings: White-Mountain
Red-Raspberry Filling. ½ cupful red raspberries, White 1 egg, cupful powdered sugar, 1 cupful thick cream.
Whip the cream to a stiff froth, also the white of egg. Put the two together and with a fork stir the sugar in, blending it perfectly. At the last, just before spreading the cake, stir in the raspberries thoroughly mashed. Strawberries may be used in the same way or the pulp of fresh apricots.
Tutti-Frutti Filling. 1 cupful whipped cream, cupful powdered sugar, 1 cupful combination chopped walnuts, almonds, dates, raisins, and shaved citron. Whip the cream very stiff, beat in the sugar, then add the nuts and fruit, blending it thoroughly with a fork.
Two uncooked whipped-cream fillings from a period when raw egg white was routinely folded into anything that needed lightening. The raspberry version is the problem; the notes below cover both the safety issue and the printing gaps in the measurements.
- Raw egg white, never heatedThe red-raspberry filling folds an uncooked white into cream and sugar and spreads it straight onto cake, where it sits at room temperature between layers. Nothing in the method reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the sugar and fruit acid present are nowhere near enough to do it chemically. A current recipe using pasteurized whites, or an egg-free stabilized cream, should be used instead.
- The cream compounds itWhipped cream folded with mashed fresh berries is a good growth medium and the filling was clearly meant to sit on a finished cake. This is not the same case as raw egg in a batter that goes into the oven.
- Missing fractionsBoth recipes print "cupful powdered sugar" with the fraction apparently dropped in setting; the intended quantity is unrecoverable, though a half cup would suit the proportions. "1 cupful combination chopped walnuts, almonds, dates, raisins, and shaved citron" reads as the total of all the fruit and nuts together, not a cup of each.
- Powdered sugar then and now"Powdered sugar" in this period generally meant sugar ground finer than granulated, and need not be the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Modern confectioners' sugar dissolves faster and carries a little starch, which may slightly stiffen the cream -- no bad thing here, but it is not necessarily the same product.
- Tutti-frutti fillingThe second recipe contains no egg and is simply sweetened whipped cream carrying chopped nuts and dried fruit. It is a soft filling that will weep and slump within a few hours; a cake filled with it needs refrigerating and eating the same day.
- Shaved citronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks or diced tubs around the winter holidays. "Shaved" means cut in thin slivers rather than the coarse dice used in fruitcake, so it disperses through the cream instead of sinking.
- YieldA cupful of cream whipped, plus the beaten white, the sugar and the fruit, makes appreciably more than two cups of filling -- enough for a layer of an eight- or nine-inch cake, not for a tall stack.
Uncooked cream fillings of this kind belong to the era when the domestic ice chest and the hand egg-beater had both become common in American kitchens: whipping a cupful of cream to a stiff froth stopped being an ordeal and cold storage made it plausible to serve. Household Discoveries and its contemporaries print such fillings alongside the boiled icings and the caramel frostings, a filling being understood as something distinct from an icing -- softer, richer, and often fruited, sitting inside the cake rather than sealing it. The egg white here adds volume and a little body to the cream. "Tutti-frutti" is Italian for "all the fruits"; it was in English use by the later nineteenth century, often of ice creams and confections, and by 1900 was applied loosely to any mixture of chopped candied fruit and nuts, which is how it is used here.