Bride's Cake
1 pound flour. 3/4 pounds sugar. 1/2 pound butter. Whites of 14 eggs. Cream sugar and butter together, and stir in them flour and beaten whites, very little at a time; one and a half pounds fruit, prepared and mixed with batter, will make a nice fruit cake.--Mrs. H. D.
Bride's Cake.
Whites of 18 eggs. 1 1/4 pounds sugar. 1 pound flour. 3/4 pound butter. Cream butter and sugar together; whip the eggs to a stiff froth, then add gradually, flour, butter, sugar.
Season with lemon or brandy. Bake as pound cake.-Mrs. R. E. Bride's Cake. 1 1/2 pounds flour. 1 1/2 pounds sugar. 1 1/8 pounds butter. Whites of 20 eggs. 1/2 a teaspoon of powdered ammonia dissolved in 1/2 a wineglass of brandy.
Heavy plain icing. 1 1/2 pound mould.
Insert the ring after the cake is baked.--Miss. S.
Bride's Cake. 3/4 pound flour. 1/2 pound butter. 14 whites of eggs. 1 pound sugar-beat in the whites. The acid of 1 green lemon.
Double for one and a half pound cake.-Mrs. J.
Four versions of the same white cake, collected from four contributors and printed one after another. All are butter cakes leavened almost entirely by beaten egg whites, and all are given in weights, which is the easiest way to cook them today.
- Weigh, don't scoop1 pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 cups, 1 pound of sugar roughly 2 1/4 cups, and 1/2 pound of butter is two sticks. A scale removes the guesswork entirely and these ratios are unforgiving.
- How many egg whitesEgg sizes were not standardised, and period eggs may have run somewhat smaller than modern large eggs. Reckoned in modern large whites, fourteen is about 1 3/4 cups by volume, eighteen about 2 1/4 cups, twenty about 2 1/2 cups. Measuring the volume is more reliable than counting shells.
- The whites are the leaveningExcept for Miss S.'s version there is no chemical raising agent at all. The whites must be whipped to a stiff but not dry froth and folded in a little at a time, as Mrs. H. D. says, or the cake comes out a dense slab.
- Powdered ammoniaMiss S. calls for baker's ammonia (ammonium carbonate), a leavener still sold for cookies and crisp biscuits. It works by vaporising, which means it needs a thin, dry crumb to escape from; in a cake this deep a residual ammonia smell can linger. Half a teaspoon in something over five pounds of batter is a token amount in any case.
- A wineglassRoughly 2 fluid ounces, about a quarter cup.
- "Bake as pound cake"The original gives no temperature. In a modern oven, a slow to moderate setting, somewhere around 300-325F, in a deep greased and papered tin. A full-size cake of this weight will take roughly 1 1/2 to 2 hours; tent it once the top has coloured and test with a skewer.
- "The acid of 1 green lemon"Most likely the juice of an unripe lemon, though 'green' in period usage can also just mean fresh. The juice of one lemon plus a little zest is a reasonable stand-in, and the acid also helps stabilise the whites.
- "1 1/2 pound mould"Genuinely ambiguous. It most likely refers to a tin of a size that took a cake made on a 1 1/2 pound flour basis, not to the finished weight. Mrs. J.'s "double for one and a half pound cake" suggests the same unit of reckoning. Judge by volume: this batter should fill a tin no more than two-thirds.
- Heavy plain icingProbably a stiff icing beaten from egg white and sifted sugar, spread thick and white. It sets hard, which is part of why such cakes could be tiered and could travel.
- The ringInserted after the cake is baked rather than mixed in before. If you follow the custom, wrap the ring first.
- YieldMrs. J.'s and Mrs. H. D.'s work out to about the same, roughly three pounds of batter, or a single large cake. Mrs. R. E.'s and Miss S.'s are considerably larger, on the order of four to five pounds and up, and are better split between two tins.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from the contributed receipts of some two hundred and fifty Virginia housekeepers, which is why four bride's cakes sit here in a row over four sets of initials rather than one authoritative version. The bride's cake was the white cake of a nineteenth-century wedding, its whiteness the whole point: whites only, no yolks to yellow the crumb, no molasses or spice, finished in hard white icing. It was traditionally paired with a dark, heavily fruited groom's cake, and Mrs. H. D. notes that her batter takes fruit if you want it, which turns the same formula into the other half of the pair. The ring baked or set into the cake belongs to a family of wedding-cake charms — ring, thimble, coin — read as fortunes by whoever found them, a custom generally traced to older British bride-cake practice and carried through the American South. That Miss S. specifies inserting it after baking rather than before is a small practical mercy to the person cutting.