Cake: Juice
1/2 cupful butter, 3/4 cupful milk, 1/2 cupful butter, Lady Baltimore Cake. 1 cupful butter, 2 cupfuls powdered sugar, 1 cupful milk, Juice 1 lemon, Whites 6 eggs, 4 cupfuls flour, 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder.
Rub the butter and sugar to a cream, and add the milk; when well mixed, stir in the juice of the lemon and whip very light; stir in alternately the stiffened whites of eggs and flour, sifted with the baking powder.
Bake in jelly-tins. When cold, put together with this filling, and frost the top: Boil 3 cupfuls granulated sugar with a cupful water until a drop hanging from the tip of a spoon threads in the air. Pour while hot over the whites 3 eggs whipped to a standing froth. Whip until you have a thick cream and stir in gradually a cupful each minced raisins and chopped pecans with 5 figs that have been soaked soft in lukewarm water, then dried and minced. Cocoanut Cake. 1 cupful sugar, cupful butter, cupful milk, 3 eggs, 2 1/2 cupfuls flour, 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, 1 grated cocoanut.
Cream the sugar and butter; take the milk of the cocoanut and, if not enough, add sweet milk to make cupful. Add the beaten yolks, then flour and baking powder sifted, then beaten whites, and lastly the grated cocoanut, reserving some for the frosting of the loaf. This is to be baked in a deep tin.
Orange Cake. 2 cupfuls sugar, cupful butter, cupful cold water, Yolks 5 eggs, 2½ cupfuls flour, 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder, Juice and rind 1 orange, Whites 3 eggs.
Bake in layers; use boiled icing flavored with orange juice.
Three white and yellow layer cakes from the era when a baking-powder company's name got printed into the ingredient list. The text has lost some fractions in setting, and a few of the measures do not mean what a modern reader assumes.
- QuantitiesThe coconut cake calls for 2 1/2 cupfuls flour. "Cupful butter" throughout means one full cup, about half a pound, and the lemon in the Lady Baltimore is the juice only, roughly 3 tablespoons.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period "powdered sugar" generally means finely ground granulated sugar, closest to today's caster or superfine, rather than modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch and can give a chalky crumb.
- Calumet baking powderA heavily advertised double-acting powder combining phosphate with sodium aluminium sulphate; the brand name printed into the ingredient list suggests the recipe passed through company promotional material. Any modern double-acting baking powder at the same 2 teaspoons works.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; home ranges of the period were rarely thermostatically controlled. As a modern equivalent, bake the jelly-tin layers at 350F for 20 to 25 minutes, and the deep-tin coconut loaf at 350F for 45 to 55 minutes, testing the center.
- "Jelly-tins"Round shallow layer pans, about 8 or 9 inches. The Lady Baltimore batter is large — it fills three 9-inch pans comfortably.
- The syrup stage is the hinge"Threads in the air" corresponds to roughly 230 to 240F on a thermometer. Below that the boiled icing stays soupy and will run out from between the layers; much above it the meringue turns grainy and sets before it is spread. Pour the syrup in a thin stream down the side of the bowl with the whites beating, not all at once.
- Grated cocoanutOne fresh coconut yields roughly 3 to 4 cups grated meat and about ½ cup of liquid. Unsweetened desiccated coconut substitutes by volume; since it contributes no coconut water, make the full cup of liquid up with milk as the recipe already allows.
- The figs and raisinsSoaking the figs and then drying them before mincing matters — wet fruit weeps into the meringue and slackens it. Chop all the fruit fine, or the layers will not sit level.
- Boiled icing and raw whitesThe hot syrup brings the whites well up in temperature but does not reliably pasteurize them. If serving anyone who should avoid raw egg, use pasteurized whites.
- YieldThe Lady Baltimore gives a three-layer cake serving 12 to 16; the orange cake serves about 10.
Lady Baltimore cake is generally traced to Charleston, South Carolina, and to Owen Wister's 1906 novel Lady Baltimore, in which the narrator eats a white cake of that name bought at a women's exchange bakery; the recipe is traditionally credited to Alicia Rhett Mayberry, who is said to have sent Wister one, though the story is not documented. Whatever its origin, the cake spread widely through American cookbooks and newspaper columns in the years after the novel, usually with the same signature: a plain white butter cake bound with boiled meringue frosting loaded with raisins, figs and pecans. Its appearance here, alongside coconut and orange layer cakes and a named brand of baking powder, suggests the page belongs to the early twentieth-century chemical-leavening trade, when flour and baking-powder companies distributed recipe leaflets that were copied into household compendiums. The reliance on stiffly beaten whites for lift, with baking powder as insurance, looks back to the older sponge tradition then giving way to the modern creamed butter cake.