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Favorite Dishes in Famous Homes: Cake
White Loaf Cake. 1 cupful butter, 2 cupfuls sugar, 1 cupful sweet milk, 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder, 5 cupfuls flour, Whites 13 eggs.
Cream butter and sugar, sift baking powder with flour, and alternately add it with milk to sugar and butter. Last of all, cut in whites of eggs whipped to a stiff froth. Bake in layer-cake pans.
Filling for Cake 2 cupfuls sugar, Whites 2 eggs, pound marshmallows, 1 pound English walnuts.
Cook sugar with cupful water.
When it threads, pour over whites of eggs not beaten very much and MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK marshmallows. Shell walnuts, break slightly, add to filling, and put between layers of cake. From Mrs. John Burke, wife of Governor of North Dakota. Angel-Food Pudding. 2 eggs, 1 cupful powdered sugar, 1 tablespoonful flour, 1 teaspoonful baking powder, 1 cupful broken walnut meats, 1 cupful dates.
A rich white layer cake with a boiled marshmallow-walnut frosting, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you knew your own stove. The two places it needs help are the oven, which is never mentioned, and the syrup, which decides whether the filling sets or slumps.
- Oven and pansNo temperature is given. Bake the layers at 350F. Five cups of flour makes a large batter: three 9-inch layers, or four 8-inch, filled no more than two-thirds deep, 25 to 30 minutes.
- Thirteen whitesThat is roughly 1 3/4 to 2 cups of egg white from modern large eggs. Weigh if you can and aim for about 400 g; older eggs ran smaller, so measuring by volume is more reliable than counting.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that many recipes of the period called for. Use whole milk at room temperature so the creamed butter does not seize.
- LeaveningTwo teaspoons of baking powder for five cups of flour is light by current standards, and the recipe leans on the whipped whites for lift. Fold them in with a light hand in three additions; deflate them and the cake will be dense and rubbery.
- "Cut in" the whitesNineteenth-century phrasing for folding, not for cutting fat into flour. The batter is stiff before the whites go in, so slacken it with a spoonful of the beaten whites first, then fold in the rest.
- Thread stageCook the sugar syrup to 230-235F on a thermometer. Below that the filling stays a sticky glaze; above it, the frosting sets hard and crumbles when the cake is cut.
- Missing filling quantitiesThe weight of marshmallows and the water for the syrup are not fully stated in this text. As a working proportion, two cups sugar to about half a cup water, with roughly half a pound of marshmallows, gives a spreadable filling. Note that the recipe pours the hot syrup over the whites and the marshmallows together rather than melting the marshmallows into the syrup first.
- Egg whites in the fillingThe hot syrup warms but does not reliably pasteurize the two unbeaten whites. Use pasteurized whites if serving anyone very young, elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised.
- YieldA cake this size serves 16 to 20. The frosting is very sweet; cut it in narrow slices.
Cakes built entirely on egg whites went by names like white cake, silver cake or bride's cake, and they were a product of cheap refined sugar, chemical baking powder and reliable white flour, all of which arrived in American kitchens over the second half of the nineteenth century. Period cookbooks often pair such a cake with a gold cake to use up the leftover yolks, though this printed recipe says nothing of the sort. The marshmallow-and-walnut boiled filling is consistent with the early 1900s, when commercially made marshmallows had become widely available and were turning up in frostings, fudges and salads. The attribution to Mrs. John Burke, whose husband served as governor of North Dakota from 1907, is typical of the celebrity-contribution cookbooks of the period, which gathered recipes from public figures' wives to lend authority and sell copies.