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Favorite Dishes in Famous Homes: Beat
Beat together thoroughly eggs, sug ar, flour, and baking powder, add nuts and dates. Pour into a baking dish, set it in a pan of boiling water and bake about half an hour. Let it cool, still standing in the water, chill, and serve with whipped cream.
This pudding is a great favorite with children.
From Mrs. Samuel G. Cosgrove, wife of Governor of Washington.
Potato Cake. cupful butter, 2 cupfuls sugar, Yolks 4 eggs, 1 cupful hot mashed potato, 2 squares chocolate, ½ cupful milk, 2 cupfuls flour, 3½ teaspoonfuls baking powder, 1 teaspoonful each cinnamon and nutmeg, teaspoonful ground cloves, 1 cupful chopped walnut meats, Whites 4 eggs.
Cream together butter and 1 cupful sugar, beat to a froth yolks of eggs with remainder of sugar, then blend both mixtures thoroughly together.
Add potatoes, chocolate melted over hot water, and alternately milk with flour, which has been sifted with baking powder and spices. Last, add whites of eggs whipped to a stiff froth and walnut meats. Bake in layers or a loaf cake as desired, and cover with a chocolate or a white frosting.
From Mrs. W. R. Stubbs, wife of Governor of Kansas.
Pickled Peaches. 1 gallon peeled peaches, 3 pounds sugar, 1 pint pure cider vinegar, 2 dozen cloves, 6 sticks cinnamon.
Boil vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, and cloves fifteen minutes, then pour liquor over peaches and let stand over night in stone jar covered with a plate. Next morning pour off liquor and heat to boiling point, then add peaches to boiling liquor and let cook slowly until tender. Seal in glass jars.
From Mrs. Parker Morgan, one of the 400.
Raspberry Buns. 1 pound flour, pound lard, 6 ounces sugar, teaspoonful salt, 1½ teaspoonsfuls baking powder, 1 egg, A little milk.
Three complete formulas sit on this page — the tail of a date-and-nut pudding, a chocolate potato cake, and pickled peaches — plus the opening of a raspberry bun. The cake is entirely workable today; the pickled peaches are not, for the reason given below.
- The pickled peaches are the problemThe syrup is roughly one pint of vinegar against a gallon of fruit and three pounds of sugar, and the fruit is then sealed hot into jars with no processing time, no temperature and no headspace given. Open-kettle sealing of low-acid-diluted fruit is no longer considered sound; use a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority if you want pickled peaches.
- Everything else on the pageThe pudding and the potato cake are ordinary baked goods and carry no unusual risk. Only the preserving instructions should be set aside.
- The pudding is baked in a water bath"Set it in a pan of boiling water" means a bain-marie: the dish sits in a larger pan with boiling water around it. The recipe gives no oven temperature; a moderate oven for the half hour indicated is the usual modern reading. Note the instruction to cool it in the water, which is generally held to keep a soft egg pudding from cracking or weeping.
- Mashed potato in cakeThe recipe calls for it hot; plain riced or well-mashed potato without added butter, milk or salt is the safest reading, since the seasoning and fat are already accounted for elsewhere in the formula. The starch holds moisture and is usually credited with this style of cake's dense crumb.
- "2 squares chocolate"A square meant one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so two ounces total. Melt over hot water rather than direct heat, as directed, and let it cool slightly before it meets the creamed butter.
- Baking powder quantityThree and a half teaspoons for two cups of flour is high by modern standards, even allowing for the cup of potato adding bulk. With modern double-acting powder, expect a fast rise and a coarse crumb; reducing it is worth considering.
- Cake tins and timingThe recipe leaves pan, temperature and time entirely to the cook ("Bake in layers or a loaf cake as desired"). It is a large batter, so more than two shallow layers may be needed; bake in a moderate oven and test with a skewer in the centre.
- Beating the whites separatelyThe whites go in last, whipped stiff and folded rather than stirred. This is the only lift the cake gets beyond the powder, and heavy mixing at this stage will give a tight, greasy layer.
Cookbooks of collected "favorite dishes" from governors' wives, senators' wives and society hostesses were a common fundraising and publishing formula in the early twentieth century, which places the contributors here: Mrs. Samuel G. Cosgrove's husband was governor of Washington in 1909, and Mrs. W. R. Stubbs's husband governed Kansas from 1909 to 1913. The potato cake belongs to a genuine American tradition of using leftover mashed potato as a moistening agent in spice and chocolate cakes, a thrift measure that persisted because it worked "amamon were standard summer preserving work in households with a stone jar and a cellar, served alongside roast pork and ham through the winter.